Wind Energy: Offshore Sites

Lord Higgins: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	Whether they will withhold consent to the construction of offshore wind farms between Morecambe Bay, the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland in view of potential obstruction to navigation in recognised shipping lanes.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I obviously cannot comment on specific projects where an application for consent has been made, but wind farms that would be a danger to navigation will not be approved. The Secretary of State will also take into account any commercial impact on shipping in reaching a decision. None of the wind farms planned for the east Irish Sea is in a,
	"recognised sea lane essential to international navigation",
	as defined by a recent DTI and Department for Transport paper on the subject.

Lord Higgins: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Is it not the case that the departments concerned are giving priority to the interests of wind farms and not taking sufficiently into account the dangers of vessels hitting wind farms, causing pollution and, consequently, an environmental disaster? On his specific answer on this point, is the department defining shipping lanes too narrowly? Some of these lanes are important and are in danger of being blocked by proposals now coming forward.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: The department is carefully balancing the interests of the wind farms with those of navigation, which is as it should be. We are doing a lot of work on safety but we look to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to advise on a case-by-case basis. We drafted the definition,
	"recognised sea lanes essential to international navigation",
	on a clear and principled basis; it gives due weight to the undertakings to the international shipping community, our obligations to the International Maritime Organisation and our treaty obligations in respect of access to our ports.

Lord Redesdale: My Lords, have there ever been any accidents where ships collide with offshore wind turbines? Would not the captain of any such ship be negligent, because such turbines are clearly marked and show up on radar?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am not aware of any accidents, but that is hardly surprising because there have not been many offshore wind farms for very long. We should approach safety in a rather more practical, forward-looking way. In the DTI, we have done a lot of work on developing a robust methodology for developers and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to use in assessing navigational risk. We have also provided funds for a database of vessel movements that feeds into the navigation risk assessment process, so we are doing the work properly to assess future risk.

Lord Roberts of Conwy: My Lords, is the Minister fully aware of the vast extent of the proposals for wind farms in the east Irish Sea, as he calls it? It involves a positive infestation of wind farms, which will threaten the tourism industry along the North Wales coast and is causing a great deal of local concern.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I understand that there is concern. The word "infestation" probably over-dramatises the situation. Clearly one considers whether a large number of turbines has a greater impact on safety, the environment or commerce. The Secretary of State will take account of all those factors in making decisions.

Lord Clark of Windermere: My Lords, does my noble friend accept that most of us living in Cumbria would prefer offshore wind farms to wind farms in the vicinity of a national park onshore?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, it is a general principle of all energy sources that people would prefer them to be somewhere else and to be a different energy source.

Lord Hylton: My Lords, the Minister referred yesterday to the importance of having a proper mix of energy supplies. Will the Government therefore encourage and try to bring forward as soon as possible combined heat and power stations, especially those fuelled by roundwood, wood waste and biomass? I declare my interest as a woodland owner.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am delighted that someone is focusing on the point that a diversity of energy sources is absolutely key to dealing with energy issues. As noble Lords will know, combined heat and power is one of the sources which we see playing a significant part.

Lord Roberts of Llandudno: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the proposal mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Conwy, for Llandudno Bay is for 236 wind turbines, each to be higher than the Blackpool Tower?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I did not realise that. But to have any significance, there needs to be a considerable number of wind turbines, which is what we are looking at.

Lord De Mauley: My Lords, will the Minister clarify who will bear the financial consequences of any wind farms proving to be hazardous to shipping or fishing? What steps will the Government take to ensure that such hazards are minimised?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, we will deal with safety by not giving permission where there are safety hazards. Commercial impact is obviously one of the considerations that has to be looked at in making decisions. Having looked at this, the commercial impact can be exaggerated. I looked at the route from Heysham to the Isle of Man and the extra distance that you would have to go to get round the wind farms. It would be 1.3 nautical miles, an increase of 2.2 per cent on the journey time. At 18 knots, the journey would take an extra four minutes. I cannot believe that that would cause serious commercial damage.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, will the Minister clarify the reply that he gave to the noble Lord, Lord Clark? Is it the Government's policy to concentrate on offshore wind farms, which obviously environmentally are much less offensive? If that concentration is serious, are they prepared to block further environmentally desecrating developments, such as the huge structures on Romney Marsh and other beauty spots, in the interests of concentrating on offshore wind farms? That would be very reassuring to many people who feel that onshore sites are environmentally very damaging.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, we want to proceed with onshore and offshore sites. Each site will be judged on commercial viability, which obviously the developers are concerned with, and its environmental impact.

Lord Dubs: My Lords, if wind farms are to be onshore—I fully accept that offshore sites are environmentally better—why not line motorways with them, other than in national parks?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, this is a question of what developers want to do. When propositions are put forward we will consider their environmental impact.

Mental Health Bill: Race Equality Impact Assessment

Lord Ouseley: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What progress they have made in preparing a race equality impact assessment on the proposed mental health Bill.

Lord Warner: My Lords, the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Rosie Winterton, announced further consultation on the race equality impact assessment on 7 December. Officials met the National BME Mental Health Network before Christmas to discuss the next steps. In November, the Department of Health held three consultation events on the race equality impact assessment on the proposed mental health Bill and the Mental Health Act Commission carried out interviews with 109 detained patients from 12 trusts.

Lord Ouseley: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that helpful reply. No doubt he is aware that the National Black and Minority Ethnic Mental Health Network is still very dissatisfied with the provisions in the draft Bill. Is it the Minister's clear intention to ensure that the Bill is not presented before it meets the concerns of the network? I am sure he is aware that one in five of all in-patients in mental health hospitals and facilities in England and Wales are from black and minority ethnic communities. It is of special concern that black males have higher admission rates, are disproportionately referred by the police and courts compared with other groups, are up to 44 per cent more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Acts when compared with the average for all other in-patients, are more often subjected to seclusion, control and restraint, and are more likely to be held in medium or high-security wards. Will the Minister please indicate how he intends to meet the concerns of the network?

Lord Warner: My Lords, the Government share the concerns expressed by the noble Lord. That is why in January 2005 they published their action plan, Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health Care. That publication has led to a great deal of work being done to take forward the agenda. Whether we will ever satisfy everyone in relation to the mental health Bill is not an assurance I can give to the House. It is a controversial area. However, we are determined to work with the interest groups mentioned by the noble Lord, as well as with all stakeholders, to make sure that the race equality impact assessment that is to accompany the Bill will be the result of the fullest possible consultation.

Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, will the race equality impact assessment, whatever that may mean, cost money? Does he not agree that it would be better to use such money for treating patients who need help now?

Lord Warner: My Lords, I am afraid that I have to disagree with the noble Baroness, possibly not for the first time. The race equality impact assessment is a crucial part of the Government's commitment to showing what impact this legislation and, in some cases, other policy areas will have on black and minority ethnic groups. The cost is modest and it is money well spent. The assessment does its best to ensure that government legislation is accepted by the people who are affected by it.

Baroness Tonge: My Lords, the Minister may be aware that under the present regulations black men are 44 per cent more likely to be sectioned than those from other ethnic groups. Yet it is being proposed in the new Bill that the police will be able to enter people's homes without a warrant and take them away for treatment. With alarm bells ringing in my ears about the draconian Terrorism Bill and the disproportionate impact it will have on ethnic minorities, does the Minister share my concern about the direction in which the Government are taking us?

Lord Warner: My Lords, the House will not be surprised to learn that I do not share the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness. What I will say in response is that she does need to wait until the Bill is published. No doubt we will be able to debate her concerns as the Bill goes through this House.

Baroness Morris of Bolton: My Lords, is it not true that the Minister in another place, Rosie Winterton, extended the opportunity for consultation only after pressure from BME communities, mental health charities and MPs, and a final admission that there were major problems over the first consultation, with few BME attendees? Can the Minister explain how the Government will ensure that they reach this vital group of mental health service users in further consultations?

Lord Warner: My Lords, I do not quite accept the noble Baroness's account of affairs. We are always willing to look at ways of improving our consultation processes and we are working hard to ensure that all the people she mentioned are involved in the consultation process on the race equality impact assessment. We will continue with that work.

Baroness Howells of St Davids: My Lords, are the Government confident that the progress being made in preparing the race equality impact assessment will be sustained?

Lord Warner: My Lords, let me reassure my noble friend that we are committed to producing this assessment and the purpose of it is to highlight actions to safeguard against possible adverse impacts of mental health legislation for BME groups. We will continue to work with those groups to ensure that race equality issues are properly built into the implementation of the Act, the way we monitor it and the code of practice developed for it.

Lord Ackner: My Lords, why have we dropped the use of the word "effect" and seized upon this odd word "impact"?

Lord Warner: My Lords, this is a government who like to have impact.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, does the Minister have any evidence about the disparity of treatment between black patients and others, and if not, will he look at evidence that may be available from other sources, including the Commission for Racial Equality?

Lord Warner: My Lords, we have certainly been in touch with and been guided by the Commission for Racial Equality in taking forward work on the race equality impact assessment. The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, is of course quite right in saying that there are discrepancies and disparities in the ways people are treated. The Government have accepted that there are problems to be tackled. That is why, following the David Bennett inquiry, we published Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health Services at the beginning of last year, and that is why we are taking forward the agenda in that document.

Botswana: Kalahari Bushmen

The Lord Bishop of Oxford: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What representations they have made to the government of Botswana concerning the rights of the Bushmen in the Kalahari.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, we monitor closely the situation concerning the small San community in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Our High Commission staff last visited the reserve and resettlement areas in June 2005. They have visited the area three times in the past two years and officials plan to make further visits in the near future. We discuss the issue with the Botswana Government and with other interested parties at regular intervals.

The Lord Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. As he will know, 242 heads of Bushmen families have an outstanding legal case against the Botswana Government in order that they might return to their ancestral lands. It has been adjourned a number of times but returns to the court on 6 February. I wonder whether the Minister would be able before that date to make representations to the Botswana Government, reminding them that in 1961 the British government declared this a game reserve in order to safeguard the way of life of the Bushmen and to raise particular concerns about the use of force in removing the Bushmen from their ancestral lands. Finally, only last year the Botswana Government apparently wanted to change the constitution in order to remove such safeguards as the Bushmen have. There are very major concerns which I hope the Minister will be able to convey before that date.
	{**12**}

Lord Triesman: My Lords, we have consistently urged on the Government of Botswana that no violence or undue duress should be placed on people. Issues arise as to the way in which the Government of Botswana are trying to deliver services to all of their people; I do not think that in an answer this brief it would be possible to go through all of them. But we do raise those human rights issues. The United Kingdom believes that all indigenous people are entitled to have their individual human rights fully respected and we support efforts to protect and promote those rights. There is no doubt that the change in the constitution was taken through a proper and constitutional set of provisions by a government who behave in a broadly democratic way.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, do the Government agree that this whole tragic saga does nothing but unnecessary damage to the reputation of Botswana and its people, whom we all otherwise hold in such high regard? Is not the deeper problem that the African herdsman and his descendents tend to look down on the hunter-gatherer, to put it politely? So, what we are really looking at here is our old friend racism, which has resulted in a policy almost of ethnic cleansing towards these peaceful and spiritual people. While I appreciate that the Government cannot get involved in the legal proceedings, could they not at least, in pursuit of their ethical foreign policy—and here I echo the request of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford—give the Government of Botswana a friendly nudge towards acceptance and indeed encouragement of the Bushmen and their chosen way of life?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I say candidly to the House that I am not greatly drawn to the stereotypes which are sometimes provided of the lifestyles of people who are often living in what may be traditional but also potentially very difficult circumstances. The Government of Botswana have made it plain that they want to see education provision for the children of all people in Botswana and proper health provision in a place where HIV/AIDS is a significant problem. They live in a country the size of France, populated by 1.5 million people. Unless they can get a degree of concentration of people, those aspirations will not be met. The San people themselves, and certainly the younger and new generation of the San people, are clear that they want to live with some of the advantages of modernity.

Lord Avebury: My Lords, if the Government have welcomed the granting of collective rights to indigenous peoples by individual states and said that they have no objection to the incorporation of such rights in the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, what is holding up progress on signing such an agreement, which would provide a yardstick by which the particular disputes in Botswana could be assessed? With regard to the offer made in talks by Roy Sesana, leading to an amicable settlement, will the noble Lord suggest to Vice-President Khama that in legal disputes it is common for people to negotiate behind the scenes while the case continues, and that the stipulation that the case should be withdrawn is not acceptable?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, on the last point, I have no difficulty in putting forward the argument that often more than one channel is open at any one time. The United Kingdom's position on the ILO Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention was set out in 1989 in a government White Paper. It noted that the convention was essentially an update of the 1957 Convention 107 and explained that that convention could not be applied in the United Kingdom as there were no indigenous tribal or semi-tribal people there who would be covered by such provisions. Therefore, the government of the day rightly concluded that they should not ratify that as applying to the United Kingdom. I think we can respond with some sympathy to those circumstances elsewhere in the world but we would do ourselves no favours by pretending that those arrangements made a great deal of sense between the extremes of the United Kingdom's territory.

Baroness Rawlings: My Lords, how do Her Majesty's Government take account of the inevitable conflict between economic development, environmental issues and indigenous rights, as shown by the removal of the Kalahari Bushmen, when giving aid to developing countries?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, we do not make our aid conditional in that sense. There is certainly a degree of conditionality, as we are seeing in parts of Africa at the moment, that there should be good governance. But in Botswana there has been a reliable system of government since 1966. It has a reliable economy, growing, I believe, at about 7 per cent per annum. It has mechanisms for the representation of its peoples internally, and it came to its conclusions through a system that would be hard to describe as other than democratic. Those conflicts exist, but a government who decide that they want to provide education, health and so on for everyone have to work out in the circumstances how to do that.

Elections: Arbuthnott Commission

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What is their response to the recommendations of the report of the Arbuthnott Commission on Boundary Differences and Voting Systems.

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, this Question gives a wholly new meaning to the term "topical question". As I rise to answer it—or rather not answer it—Sir John Arbuthnott is still on his feet in Glasgow launching his independent report. As my noble friend well knows, it would, to put it mildly, be unusual for the Government to respond to a report before or during its launch. Or is there an important point I'm missing?

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for recognising my prescience in tabling this Question today. Does he recall that the reason for this commission is the confusion and chaos we face in Scotland with four different voting systems—for local government, Holyrood, Westminster, and European elections—and separate boundaries for Holyrood and Westminster? Is he, like me, disappointed at reports that this commission has not come up with a coherent set of proposals to deal with those problems? If they do nothing else arising from the commission, will the Government at least consider legislating to stop people standing both for constituency and list seats in the Scottish Parliament, thereby turning losers into winners?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, I must congratulate my noble friend on one thing: being first past the post with his question on this report. A mere 15 minutes ago my right honourable friend Alistair Darling issued a press statement, and with the permission of the House I will read a short part of it:
	"The report contains a number of interesting recommendations and proposals. I will consider these carefully and respond in due course. There is now an opportunity for full consideration and debate on these proposals".
	That statement makes my position, at the Dispatch Box now, absolutely clear.

Baroness Carnegy of Lour: My Lords, the report was recently published, but it seems that the commissioners listened to pleas for fairness to voters outside Scotland's central belt and to pleas for smaller political parties. In the careful consideration I am sure the Government will give, will they look particularly carefully at the arguments for the present system, with its faults, over other systems? In particular, does not the quality of candidates in Scotland depend on the highly desirable measure which stands at the moment that candidates can stand for both constituency and list?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for making that point. Of course what she says will be part of the debate that we will now have. The report, which is now available in the Printed Paper Office, has an appendix showing how wide the consultation was. As the noble Baroness said, it extended beyond the Scottish boundaries.

Lord Maclennan of Rogart: My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that there is a great deal to be studied with care and that it would be wrong to jump to conclusions? The underlying support for proportionality in representation is clear throughout. To strengthen the position of the individual in the substitution of open lists for closed lists is a particularly welcome recommendation. Although it is clear that this House will not want to pass a rapid verdict on the case, as Sir John Arbuthnott puts it, for introducing a proportional system for Westminster elections, should we not come back to the subject soon?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, the noble Lord has an advantage over me as I see that he has a copy of the report in his hand, so he has actually read it. His point is that there are a number of issues in the report which he thinks need to be fully discussed. As the Secretary of State said, this will happen over the next period.

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that my noble friend Lord Foulkes shows perhaps less prescience than a taste for the pre-emptive strike? Nonetheless, he has raised a number of important questions and it would be good to have the opportunity to debate them in this House in due course.

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, as I have been reminded by the Chief Whip, that, of course, is a matter for the usual channels. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, has brought to the attention of the House an important matter which I am sure will be debated when the Government give their response to the Arbuthnott report.

Lord Sewel: My Lords, can I seek assurance from my noble friend the Minister that the Government in reaching a judgment on the recommendations of the Arbuthnott Commission will give consideration not only to its impact on Scotland but also to the possible implications for the rest of the United Kingdom?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, my noble friend makes a very good point. It is now on record and will be part of the discussion that we are going to have.

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean: My Lords, will the Minister take rather more seriously the criticism by his noble friend Lord Foulkes of the chaos and confusion that have been created in Scotland? Does he acknowledge that this is entirely the result of measures introduced by this Government? On the issue of whether candidates who are on the list may also stand for constituencies, how is it possible to have completely different systems in Wales and in Scotland? Is that not another example of muddled thinking leading to confusion throughout the whole of the United Kingdom?

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, it is quite the contrary. It is a very good example of clarity of thought by this Government. The remit for the Arbuthnott Commission was based on the very points that the noble Lord has made: there are problems; what do we do to solve them? The Government set up a commission; we have the report and we will discuss it very shortly. That is precisely what the noble Lord seems to be asking for.

Baroness Wilcox: My Lords, may I just—

Lord Grocott: No.

Baroness Wilcox: My Lords, I think that it would be helpful.

Lord Grocott: My Lords, everyone tries to be helpful here but we have run out of time on Questions.

Business

Lord Grocott: My Lords, I have a short Business Statement. With the leave of the House, a Statement on safeguarding children will be repeated by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. The Statement will be repeated immediately after the first debate in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold.

Work and Families Bill

Brought from the Commons; read a first time, and ordered to be printed.

Business of the House: Debates Today

Lord Grocott: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in the name of my noble friend the Leader of the House on the Order Paper.
	Moved, That the debate in the name of the Baroness Shephard of Northwold set down for today shall be limited to three hours and the debate in the name of the Earl Attlee set down for today shall be limited to two hours.—(Lord Grocott.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Education

Baroness Shephard of Northwold: rose to call attention to education in schools; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, I am delighted to have the chance to move this Motion today on what is certainly a momentous day for education, as will be fully appreciated by the Minister. I am equally delighted that the debate has attracted a wide and distinguished range of speakers from your Lordships' House.
	Many education issues are today claiming our attention. Tempting as it would be to address all of them in my 15 minutes, I intend to focus my remarks—in the tradition of this House—for the most part on the long view. That may be a relief to the Minister.
	Education is quite simply one of the most important issues there can be for any government, for any society and for any individual. While all threads of the education tapestry are important, it is education in schools which touches the lives of every child in the nation. It is also, since everyone has been through the system, an issue on which there are at any time, in my experience, 40 million experts in our nation willing to opine—a matter which the Minister will have quickly learnt on his appointment, as will all other former education Ministers and Secretaries of State in this House.
	What is the purpose of a school? A reasonable working definition might be that it is, "to teach children to learn to achieve their highest potential". If that is the purpose, how can any government through their education policy get the maximum number of schools to achieve the standards of the best? What are the tools available to a government? They might be defined as follows. First, there is the issue of resources. Funding—what is spent—is always high on the agenda. While money is obviously important, it is clear that the way money is spent is as important as the amount. Secondly, there is the question of structure and, in particular, the development of choices for parents between different kinds of school. Structure has featured prominently in educational debate since the 1944 Act. There are of course other tools, like curriculum, exam structure and organisational issues, but I intend to limit my remarks to a discussion about the first two.
	As a former schools inspector and education administrator, I have always felt that what actually goes on in the classroom, the quality of leadership and teaching in a school, and above all the calibre of the head are what most influence the quality of a school. These things are certainly what matter most to parents and are most easily judged by them. Thus, one way of appraising education policy might be to examine how the policy set by government helps or hinders the leadership exercised by a good head to make every classroom a place where children are taught to learn to achieve their highest potential.
	Governments tend to make extravagant claims for the success of their policies, this Government as much as most—possibly in some areas more than most. The Government have not been inactive. In the past eight years we have seen four Secretaries of State, four White Papers, five Green Papers, nine Acts of Parliament and two strategy documents. The result of all this activity, as successive Ofsted and Select Committee reports have found, has been mixed. Despite extremely substantial sums of money being spent on school improvement, there has not been an entirely commensurate improvement in school performance, as the Select Committee pointed out in its report of a year ago. There are consistent, constant and continuing rumbles of concern from universities and from employers about the attainment of those who seek to join their ranks.
	Only now we learn that the league tables—they were published today—show a rather disappointing lack of progress in standards attained, although there seems to be a bit of a muddle about the statistics. The Minister might want to explain this to the House later. In particular, why do English and maths results seem to have been removed from the lists and, if they are included, why does the five GCSE pass rate appear to be 12 points lower than it is otherwise reported? It may be a confusion and the Minister will want to set concerns to rest, I am sure.
	There have been successes in education under this Government. Some of them have developed from our initiatives, which is of course as it should be, because all educational planning should not be done on a four-year basis. This is a terrific bind, for governments, for LEAs and obviously for schools, colleges and universities. We welcome those developments that are built on our innovations: the literacy and numeracy initiatives; a strong inspection service, with published reports; the publication of exam and test results in schools; the increased numbers of specialist schools, which seem to have been a great success; training and qualification for heads, which I was particularly concerned with when I was Secretary of State; and the adoption of the city technology college principle in academies.
	We welcome all those and other improvements in the system. As regards funding, it is undeniable that more money has been spent by this Government than by their predecessor. Improved capital investment in buildings and IT is obviously universally welcome, as are the increases in the number of teachers. What about the money spent on all the new initiatives? Has it all been spent to good effect? Has that money made it easier for heads to run better schools? Or has such a profusion of initiatives tended to confuse teachers and muddle the system?
	I know that the noble Lord will have found last week's National Audit Office report sober reading, because I am sure that he shares my view that the role of the head is crucial in underpinning the quality of the school system. The report pointed out that more than a quarter of primary schools and a fifth of secondary schools are currently without a permanent head. It adds:
	"Many local authorities and schools are finding it difficult to fill headteacher vacancies. Applicants for headteacher posts are generally falling, despite salary increases"—
	that is a significant point—
	"and there are concerns that it will be difficult to replace the large numbers of headteachers who will be retiring over the next five to ten years".
	Worryingly but unsurprisingly, the report points out that the problem is worst in precisely those areas that are most in need of good schools. The report says that what teachers most want is a better quality of initial and ongoing training and better support; salary increases were regarded as less important.
	It is undeniable that more money has been spent by this Government on education, but the fractured nature of government spending on education and the sheer number of initiatives has begun to damage the confidence of the teaching profession, and it strikes at accountability. Many of the initiatives are entirely worthy in themselves; there is no question about that. But their proliferation, together with the very important addition of revised priorities arising from Every Child Matters, is a step change—although no one ever seems to talk about it—that means overload for heads, which damages morale. Anyone who was required to respond to an endless stream of directives, changes in emphasis and frequently hostile press coverage would become not only confused—heads' professionalism can be diverted from the main task—but diluted and possibly damaged. No amount of extra spending can compensate. I hope this is not the situation that we now face. I know that the noble Lord will be very conscious of it.
	Structure is another identified policy tool for government. Since the 1944 Act that proposed a tripartite system of secondary school organisation, debate has ranged around whether the structure of education in the school sector can improve school performance. This being Britain, quite a lot of time and energy since 1944 has also been spent debating the sociological benefits of altering school structure. To my mind, the role of education in helping to achieve equality of opportunity is through the development of excellent schools with first-class leadership and excellent teaching. In other words, education should be about education and not about social engineering.
	Structure can, of course, help to raise standards. But despite the priority my party has afforded to structure in the past and the attention now being given to it by the Government, I remain of the view that what goes on in the classroom is of foremost importance, and that is why we on this side would welcome increased emphasis on banding, setting and streaming. Some structure arrangements can help schools to give of their best. Therefore, we agree with some of the White Paper's proposals, and we will be keen to support the Government in their forthcoming battle with their own supporters on, for example, the issue of greater independence and freedom for schools to develop their own ethos. That principle was behind our introduction of local financial management for schools in 1986 and our establishment of grant-maintained schools. We obviously support the White Paper's proposal to increase the number of specialist schools, which we introduced. Anyone who suggests that selection for modern language colleges can be done purely on aptitude and not on ability is playing with words. Nor, as the Times recently asserted, are modern languages a non-academic subject; I speak as a linguist. The Government really must not fight shy of admitting that selection by ability already exists across the system. On the Opposition Benches, we think that schools should be allowed to accept up to 10 per cent of their pupils in whatever specialism by aptitude or ability.
	We support the Prime Minister's proposal, in his foreword to the White Paper, that there should be increased diversity and choice for parents in the school system. However, for those conscious of circumstances in rural areas—of which there was little mention in the White Paper—it is obvious that choice is limited by parental occupation and transport opportunities. I am sorry to say that the six-mile rule change for transport eligibility implies that all rural areas are Surrey. They are not. What parents in rural areas—and indeed everywhere else—want is that their local school should be excellent; it is that simple.
	The White Paper itself is something of a conundrum to us on these Benches. The question is really: do the Government intend to do what the Prime Minister says in his foreword to it? I have a number of questions for the Minister. The ability of schools to make their own admission arrangements is crucial to the Prime Minister's vision. Yet the Secretary of State, in her address to the north of England education conference, said that:
	"Trust schools will work under exactly the same code of fair admissions as other schools do now".
	How would that give increased autonomy to heads or parents? According to Section 9 of the White Paper, local authorities would become commissioners of education, not its providers. What does that mean, especially for the accountability of people elected in their own right to be accountable for education at local level?
	Will trust schools get their funding direct? Apparently not, since the White Paper states that they will be funded in the exact same way as other schools. Does that mean via the LEA, and if so, how many private sponsors will be attracted to the enterprise? So what price this statement from the Prime Minister:
	"No one will be able to veto parents starting new schools . . . simply on the basis that there are local surplus places"?
	Did the Prime Minister tell the Treasury about that?
	If the Government choose to grasp the opportunity presented by their own White Paper—if it is indeed a pivotal moment for education, as government Ministers have said—they will certainly have support from these Benches, because the White Paper proposals can make a difference. We are ready to support the principles that I have listed. Are the Government ready? I beg to move for Papers.

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold, for initiating this debate. I am delighted to be able to contribute today.
	The last time that I spoke in your Lordships' House, I had the pleasure of introducing a short debate on social inclusion. One key conclusion of that debate was that access to high-quality education for all—particularly those who live in deprivation and, often, multiple deprivations—is a key driver for equality, and essential if we are to break the inter-generational cycle of poverty and promote social justice. I do not see that as social engineering, but as creating opportunity.
	For that reason, I am proud of the Government's continuing commitment to improving educational opportunities in all communities. I believe that we are seeing real improvements, with performance in inner cities and in more deprived communities improving even faster than the national average. For example, in inner London over 50 per cent of children now achieve five or more good GCSEs, compared to one-third in 1997. That is extremely welcome and due, not least, to a huge effort on the part of teachers, particularly head teachers. I agree that leadership is hugely important in driving standards up; the efforts made there by head teachers are phenomenal.
	However, there are still major challenges. We must see if that progress is to be just the beginning. There has been much debate about standards in English and mathematics, to which the noble Baroness already referred. I want to focus on developments in school science. I am particularly interested in that because I believe it is vital to equip our children with the skills and knowledge to understand the modern world, and to help them make decisions on things such as MMR or GM in an increasingly complex and confusing information age. It is also vital to our future prosperity as a nation. Promoting higher standards in school science is good for children, because we create greater opportunities for young people and it is vital to our economy if we are to compete globally and make the idea of a knowledge-based, value-added economy a reality.
	For years, attainment in science has lagged behind maths and English; but, at last, science is starting to catch up, with 50 per cent of pupils now achieving good grades at GCSE. That is by no means enough, but we are seeing a very gradual trend in the right direction. Indeed, at key stage 3, prior to GCSE, the promising trend seems to bode well for further improvement, with 70 per cent of 14 year-olds now achieving what is expected of their age group, as opposed to 60 per cent in 1996, according to DfES figures.
	At A-level, attainment is not such an issue. In fact, young people seem to be criticised all too often for doing too well. But the issue is how to encourage more young people to opt for science, particularly in chemistry and physics. As we all know, there is a significant gender issue here. I find it hugely disappointing, as someone who took a physics A-level a long time ago, that there are now only 5,000 girls taking physics at A-level. While the number, not the percentage, of young people going to university to study science is increasing, there are real concerns, as we have heard, about the supply of future scientists and engineers—as well as teachers. This is a particular issue with regard to the physical sciences.
	I was pleased that in 2002 my right honourable friend the Chancellor commissioned from Sir Gareth Roberts a review of the supply of people with science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills. His analysis has proved to be extremely valuable. He made a number of recommendations regarding the development of school science, and I am delighted that the Government and the teaching professions have responded so positively.
	There are some very exciting things going on in school science that give me great cause for optimism. As Roberts recommended, the school science community has a strong commitment to changing the elitist image of science, tackling the assumption that science is too hard for normal kids and introducing a culture of creativity and innovation within the school laboratory. That has been a great success; some 269 schools cite science as their first specialty. They are working to drive up standards of teaching and attainment, as well as working with their feeder primary schools to rejuvenate primary school teaching by non-specialist teachers. The Wellcome Trust has suggested that half of primary teachers do not have the confidence in their understanding of science to teach the subject effectively, so we can see why that work is so important.
	An exciting new curriculum for 14 to 16-year olds is due to be rolled out in September to promote the understanding of how science works, with acquisition of skills as a priority and less focus on old-fashioned rote learning, which is too often prevalent in the traditional curriculum. I can tell you that I know about that, because I can remember having to draw those boring diagrams of the heart or the eye, with never a question of how that knowledge could be applied or be useful. The new curriculum is ambitious in aiming to engage the majority of students and robust enough for those who want to become scientists. This should result in the offer of triple science in every school—which is essential. I would be very interested to hear the Minister's view on that.
	Perhaps the most important development is new investment in the teaching workforce in terms of recruitment and development, and ongoing professional development. More young science graduates are entering teacher training, helped by new, quite significant, bursaries. More people are entering the teaching profession later on, helped by "golden hellos". But there are still too many vacancies in science teaching posts. We need to continue in this direction and not give up promoting the recruitment and retention of more science teachers.
	Possibly more important in achieving a sustainable impact is the resource being made available for continuing professional development, which is vital. Roberts articulated what we all know to be true: science lessons can seem irrelevant to today's children, and switch them off. It is obvious; it is not rocket science—although rocket science does crop up in key stage 3 science.
	Professional development has huge potential to enrich the experience of science for children and their teachers. That is why I was delighted to see that the Wellcome Trust is, in partnership with the Department for Education and Skills, funding a £51 million initiative to create a network of professional development centres for science educators. The national network of science learning centres offers high-quality professional development for all those involved in science education, including secondary science teachers, technicians—vital—and citizenship and primary teachers, who are, as we have already heard, extremely important. The network enables those working in science education to access cutting-edge technology and leading scientific research. What is going on in stem cell research? Children may well ask that, and teachers need to be able to try out their answers in a safe environment. It aims to support teachers in delivering intellectually stimulating and relevant science education, and to help them to stay in touch with developments in science.
	This is truly exciting stuff. It offers courses such as "Science After Dark", for teachers running after-school clubs to coincide with Guy Fawkes night. Another is "Bang goes the National Curriculum", for chemistry teachers who want to pep up their teaching skills. I can remember the enormous sadness and frustration my mother felt as a science teacher in inner London when the Inner London Education Authority was abolished, and at the subsequent disappearance of professional development facilities so valued by the classroom teachers. I am delighted that, once again, professional development for science teachers is being put centre-stage by the Government.
	There is still much to do. For example, perhaps the Minister can update the House on what steps have been taken to develop specialist careers advice to end the misconception among many young people that studying science closes off options, rather than creating opportunities. We know that the vast majority of careers advisers have very little experience of science and science careers.
	On the school environment, can the Minister share with us the Government's reaction to the Royal Society of Chemistry's survey in 2004, which showed that, of the 26,000-odd science laboratories in maintained schools, only 35 per cent were graded good or excellent, but 25 per cent were considered unsafe or unsatisfactory for the teaching of science? We must be clear that the science environment is key. Obviously, the Government have made a huge investment in school facilities. I know that there are some very impressive laboratories, particularly in science specialist schools. We need to know how that can go further.
	We know from our own experience that we live in an increasingly scientific age, surrounded by technology driven by science. Even in your Lordships' House, we are to be given BlackBerrys, and there will not even be any children here to show us how to use them. Quite apart from the economic imperative, we need our young children to have a basic understanding of science just to cope with the modern world and, more importantly, to be able to participate, debate and to make sensible decisions about, say, global warming, genetic research and manipulation, vaccination and the future of energy. Good, basic science education is essential if our children are to be active participants in the future, rather than spectators.
	Like the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold, I believe that we have seen many successes under this Government. I look forward to seeing many more.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold, on introducing this important and timely debate. I endorse the sentiments expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, on the importance of science as part of the curriculum, and the difficulties that the teaching of science currently faces. She may be interested to know that, during the summer, the Select Committee on Science and Technology will be considering science education and the scarcity of teachers in that area.
	I want to take up the general issue, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, of education in schools, but I, too, do not want to address the White Paper. My noble friend Lady Walmsley, who will be winding up on these Benches, will put forward our views on it. However, I cannot hide the fact that I regard the White Paper as a thoroughly muddled document. As the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, indicated, it is relatively self-contradictory even between the introduction and the rest of the text. We on these Benches consider many of its proposals to be ill conceived.
	I want to concentrate on another report, published last week and mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard. It is from the National Audit Office and is entitled, Improving poorly performing schools in England. Last week's headlines, particularly in the tabloids, highlighted 1 million children in failing schools. It was yet another rod with which to reinforce the failure of our current education system, grabbed with gusto by our Conservative Opposition and also, I suspect, by the No. 10 policy unit.
	However, when one reads the small print of the report, one sees that the story is not totally one of failure. The number of primary schools in special measures or judged to have serious weakness last year—those judged by Ofsted to be failing—is 375 out of a total population of schools of 20,000. That is rather less than 1.5 per cent. Among them is the primary school at which I am a governor. It was rated to have serious weaknesses because it had been searching for more than a year for a new head teacher. Of course, one of the issues highlighted by the NAO report is the scarcity of people putting themselves forward to be head teachers. Again, I endorse the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, that the plethora of initiatives and the pressure on heads is such that many able deputy heads say, "Not on your nellie do I want to take on the job of being a head these days". There is great difficulty in finding new head teachers.
	I am pleased to say that I became a member of the board at the same time as the new head joined the school, and it is now moving forward and out of serious measures. But there is almost a catch-22 situation. Why was it regarded as having serious weaknesses? It was because it had a failure of leadership. Why did it have a failure of leadership? It was because it did not have a head. Given the natural turnover in a dynamic system—education is a system because there is a whole range of schools—having 1.5 per cent not up to scratch is not extraordinary. Putting it the other way around, 98.5 per cent are either satisfactory—and I agree with the Government that there are too many coasting schools which need to be better—good or excellent. Therefore, as regards primary schools, the report is one to celebrate—it is one of success rather than one of failure. In addition, it is worth noting that not only were 98.5 per cent of the schools judged to be satisfactory, good or excellent, but the number of failing primaries halved between 2001 and 2004.
	The story that emerges with secondary schools is not so good. Here, the proportion in special measures amounts to 5 per cent, a much more significant number. And in the category of underperforming schools—where the DfES looks at the value-added measures which can be seen in today's league tables by examining the intake of a school and judging whether the GCSE results measure up to what may be expected from that intake—the number of those judged to be performing poorly has increased to 23 per cent, or one in four. That emphasises that there is something seriously wrong with our secondary school system. Is GCSE achievement the right measure? If the GCSE itself is a big turn-off to some secondary school pupils, it is inevitable that we will end up by registering such poor performances. The good news is that, as with primaries, the schools that go into special measures manage to move out relatively quickly and fewer schools are being put into special measures than before.
	Although there is much to celebrate in our schools and teachers, there is something shameful in other statistics that underpin our concern on all sides with the education system. In the country as a whole, 20 per cent—or one in five—of our adult population is judged to be functionally illiterate and innumerate. That is to say that they cannot read well enough to find something like a plumber in the Yellow Pages and cannot check bills or credit card statements. We also know that approximately 10 per cent of those leaving primary school are not reading or coping with figures well enough to be able to manage the secondary school curriculum. Sadly, many of them proceed on the margins of school through key stages 3 and 4 and usually drop out of key stage 4 in secondary school. This 10 per cent form the core of what is known as the NEET group—not in education, employment or training—which somehow disappears from the educational radar at 16.
	We also need to remember that we have a rather larger proportion of young people dropping out of education and training at 16 and 17 than most other advanced industrialised countries. Yes, 53 per cent achieve five grades A to C at GCSE—although, as today's league tables indicate, not all of that 53 per cent get a maths or English GCSE—and many of them now stay in education or training through to 18 and go on to university. But the reverse of that coin is that 47 per cent do not achieve five grades A to C at GCSE, and, perhaps even more shaming, four in every 10 school leavers have no proper qualification in English or maths.
	I now return to the NEET group—the 10 per cent who fail primary and go on to fail secondary. Sadly, for all the efforts of the numeracy and literacy strategies, that figure has not changed in 20 years. Disproportionately, those children come from disadvantaged homes with low incomes, poor housing, a high prevalence of marriage breakdown and a moving population of adults in their lives as new boyfriends and girlfriends come and go. Some have been abused either physically or sexually. Some have been picked up by social services and put into care and are what we now call looked-after children. Research into the mental health of children shows that 20 per cent of children have mental health problems but fewer than half get any help with those problems. Ninety per cent of young offenders have a mental health problem when they are children, and most of those problems are apparent by the age of seven.
	I should like to pick up on that point. In my school I am the foundation stage governor, and I have spent some time talking to the foundation stage teachers. It is clear that we can identify by the age of seven those who are going to be the problem children—those who will form this 10 per cent who go on to fail through school, the NEET group. The Government are right to put resources into early years education and to attempt, through children's trusts, to ensure that all agencies are brought together. The problem is that these efforts are not carried through strongly enough into primary schools. Teachers can identify future problem children but still struggle for two to three years to gain recognition of those special educational needs, receive the extra money which that brings and get the extra pairs of hands into the classroom.
	The NAO report highlighted the fact that the extra money provided for schools in special measures was less than £500 per pupil. While spurring schools on to achieve ever higher SATs and GCSE results and naming and shaming if they do not may be a way of improving educational performance, it poses the continual problem of creating educational apartheid and, above all, of ignoring the needs of the educational underclass in our schools. It causes many of the problems of poor performance and poor behaviour.
	We need to put in place two essential reforms. The first is a real attempt to help primary schools with disproportionate numbers of disadvantaged and difficult pupils and to ensure that no pupil leaves a primary school without competence in the three Rs. Secondly, we need to reform the secondary school curriculum so that it engages and motivates the typical teenager. Sadly, the White Paper contributes to neither of those developments.

The Lord Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I too am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, for initiating this important and timely debate. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth should be speaking at this point as he is the chair of the Church of England's board of education and our lead bishop on this subject, but, as most noble Lords know, he has had to be off ill for the past six months. I am very glad to report that next week he will have his last round of chemotherapy and that he very much hopes to be back in your Lordships' House within a couple of months.
	Meanwhile, it is important that there should be a Church of England voice in this debate because the Church of England, through its 4,700 schools, is deeply committed to the educational life of this country, not in a narrow sense of making good members of the Church of England but on the basis of a clear and strong Christian faith, wanting to make a contribution to the educational development of children in the community as a whole. It is fundamental to the Church of England's philosophy on education that we are there to serve the community as a whole.
	Although the Government's White Paper makes many important points, I suppose that a key thrust is the greater emphasis on variety and choice, particularly parental choice. The Church of England has strongly believed in variety and choice throughout its long history in education. At the moment we have some voluntary aided schools and some voluntary controlled schools. We have worked very closely with the Government in recent years to make our contribution to new academies. Eight Church of England academies have opened and 25 are under discussion.
	The White Paper suggests that in addition to traditional Church of England schools, it is open to a diocese to set up a trust in which a new kind of school would be founded. It would not be a Church of England school but, again, a school serving the community as a whole. It would of course be inclusive. I know that many dioceses will be open to working with the Government if the conditions in their area are appropriate to see what kind of schools might be developed under this new kind of trust.
	An extraordinary change has taken place during the past 40 years in the Church of England's attitude to its role in education. When I was first ordained, Church schools were felt by Church members, including most clergy, as something of a burden, a bit of a drag and something that we ought to get out of as quickly as possible. The situation could not be more different now. We feel proud of our schools. We believe that they make a huge contribution to the educational life of this country. In recent years, that is significantly due to the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and the report that bears his name, which recommended that the Church of England should fund 100 new secondary schools. Although we have one in four primary schools in the country, we have only about one in 20 secondary schools. I am glad to say that the Church of England has responded to the initiative of the noble Lord and opened 44 new secondary schools, if we include the eight academies. We will work with the Government, where appropriate, to see whether schools should be refounded under the new trust system.
	It is obvious that we live in a multi-faith society. Church of England schools are now regarded by most people as faith schools alongside other faith schools. It has always seemed to me only consistent and fair to argue that if the Church of England and other Christian denominations are allowed to set up faith schools, other religions should be allowed to do so as well. Like most members of the Church of England, I firmly support the liberality in our society for Hindus or Muslims to have their own schools—with one proviso, to which I shall come in a moment. However, in view of the current emphasis in the White Paper on greater variety and greater choice, I wonder whether there is room for even more experimentation with what we may call joint-faith schools—two faiths getting together to see what they might do. Here, I express a personal interest. I am a trustee of a small group seeking to set up a genuine multi-faith school.
	People may say, "Are not all state schools multi-faith schools?". They are in the sense that they have pupils from different denominations and different religions and teach RE from a variety of different standpoints, but the kind of school that we have in mind is one in which religion is taken very seriously. The pupils will get a serious education in their own religion, whether it is Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Christianity, but they will do so in the context of pupils of other religions taking their own religion equally seriously. I am glad to say that a great deal of interest has been shown in that idea. We have had a number of bites, but we are still looking for a local authority to be a partner with whom we can pioneer that new kind of school.
	I said that I had one proviso or question mark in my mind about multi-faith schools—whether they are Church of England schools or faith schools of any other kind. That is that what goes on in there must be education, not propaganda. That is a crucial matter not only of the curriculum but of how the curriculum is taught. However attached people are to their religion, they must be taught to look at their religion from a historical and critical point of view as well as a respectful one and to be open to the possibility of their vision of the world being enlarged and enriched by other perspectives. It is fundamental that schools are in the business of education, not propaganda. The Church of England has always recognised that and that needs to be so for other faith schools of any kind.
	Religious education is one aspect of faith schools. There is no doubt that some religious education is very good. Not long ago, I read that the fastest-growing subject at A-level is religious studies. So clearly some schools are taking it very seriously indeed.
	All noble Lords are aware that there is dissatisfaction with religious education from a number of points of view. Non-Christian communities feel that the Church of England is unfairly privileged in the field. Christians feel that everything is taught except Christianity. Opinion polls indicate that 50 per cent of the people of this country—perhaps the figure is not quite as high as that—have no clue of the meaning of Easter. We want children to leave school able to read and write. They should also have a basic knowledge of what is fundamental to our cultural heritage; that is, the religion that has formed and shaped the whole way in which our society operates.
	That leads on to the great variety in quality in the different kinds of schools. As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, emphasised, some schools are very good. The majority of schools are good, and we want to celebrate that fact, but there is no doubt that schools vary enormously. I might go into a primary school for, let us say, an assembly, and the children are so quiet and good that it almost brings tears to your eyes. I visit other schools where perhaps 40 per cent of the children have special needs and all one can do is admire the heroic work of the teachers who are achieving something in that environment.
	As the White Paper emphasises, leadership, including the leadership of the head, is key. I reiterate the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, about the current difficulty of appointing heads for schools. In London, 50 per cent of headship appointments had to be re-advertised. That must be a very worrying indication which the Government need to take seriously. There can be no improvement in our worst performing schools unless they have heads of real quality who are very strongly supported. I do not know what can be done to ensure that the right heads are in those schools.
	Education is not just about achieving certain educational standards, as the noble Baroness rightly emphasised; it is about creating an ethos in which children are formed, nurtured and shaped for the future. I reiterate the importance of citizenship education. We have recently heard from the Chancellor about Britishness. For me, it is not a question of waving flags or putting flags in gardens. It is about all of us, including children, deeply appreciating and rejoicing in the institutions that we have in this country—our liberty under the rule of law, democratic government and the kind of values that make all of this possible. If we are thinking about the ethos of a school and forming citizens for the future, we may realise that citizenship education is a vital part of the school curriculum and is related to the whole issue of school morale .
	The Church of England is delighted to be able to make a continuing contribution to the education of children in this country. We will work as closely as possible with the Government in a number of ways to achieve the highest possible standards not only in educational attainment but in achieving the right ethos in our schools.

Baroness Morgan of Huyton: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, for introducing this timely debate. Like many noble Lords, my continuing passion is education, both as a parent and as a former teacher. As a Member of this House, I feel that there is nothing more important for us to spend time on discussing. When we think about the future prosperity of the country, there can be no greater concern than the skill base of our workforce and increasing opportunities for the most disadvantaged communities in the United Kingdom. Today, I want to talk specifically about this latter point: meeting the needs of children in our poorest communities.
	The facts relating to educational attainment and disadvantage are well known. I have pulled out a few to demonstrate the scale of the problem and the desperate need to keep tackling it. In 2004, only 26 per cent of pupils with free school meals achieved five good GCSEs, and for boys it was only 22 per cent. Meanwhile, pupils from the most affluent areas have a 70 per cent chance of achieving five good GCSEs, against only 30 per cent from our more disadvantaged communities. Not only do pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve worse test results at each key stage, but their progress through each level from the age of five onwards is poorer. A whole range of similar statistics is well known to all noble Lords taking part in this debate.
	Perhaps one of the most depressing facts is that social mobility is not really increasing, as demonstrated in the recent Sutton Trust report. The massive expansion of higher education has not been distributed fairly across income groups in spite of the fact that the staying-on rate in schools has narrowed considerably over the past 15 years. So, many more disadvantaged kids are now staying in school right through to the age of 18, but while the top one-fifth of income groups have seen graduation rise by 26 per cent, in the poorest income groups it has increased by only 3 per cent. That is why the change made by the Government to tuition fees was absolutely vital. It was a brave decision and the right one to take. It is also extremely helpful that the Opposition have now moved to that position as well.
	Fixed views and fatalism must not stop us being prepared to tackle the massive inequalities that still exist in education provision results. The majority of schools in this country are strong, successful and improving, but I want to talk about the areas where that is not yet the case. I should declare an interest. I advise a charity which is sponsoring city academies in very disadvantaged areas in Britain, largely in London. But my argument today is not for or against city academies or, indeed, for any particular type of school. What I want to urge is that we raise our sights collectively, along with our aspirations for these children.
	For too long, education and social thinking were dominated by an explanation of why disadvantaged children were failing at school. We were full of sympathy and the case was well argued, but there was no route upwards for these children. I remember this personally. When taking higher education degrees and as a teacher I would argue passionately about the reasons why children were failing. I was full of empathy and sympathy, particularly for those suffering from multi-deprivation who were failing the most. I do not suggest that class and background do not matter—of course they do—but disadvantage must not be an excuse for failure. The first and most vital step is for all of us to raise our sights and set high expectations for these children.
	The results of doing this are evident. Around the UK schools are achieving well ahead of other institutions in the same cohort and serving the same communities. Why is that? It is largely because of excellent leadership, a point made by many other noble Lords in the debate. The head and senior management develop great teaching practices, strong pastoral care, interesting curricula and extra-curricular activities. They bring in support from parents and the community. But, above all, these schools succeed when everyone connected to the school community knows clearly that each child can achieve and that they will be helped to achieve to their fullest potential. Everything is focused on raising achievement.
	Last November, I visited a series of urban schools in New York. I visited a particularly fascinating school in the Bronx. It was utterly inspiring. The area it served was without any redeeming features: large expanses of high-rise, dense and poor housing with absolutely no green space, not even play areas. The pupils were largely African and Hispanic and the school building was frankly grim, much worse than anything I have seen in our urban areas. The building accommodated four different schools, one on each floor. The one I visited, located on the fourth floor, had security guards at the door. It is one of a new type of school in New York: very small schools. The innovative idea is to create a primary-style of education for secondary school pupils. Every teacher knows every pupil and there is a much stronger sense of community. The size of the school, as is the case with similar ones, is 300 pupils, and the results are quite remarkable.
	Children enter the school at least two grades behind and with every type of social problem we could imagine. They leave ahead of their grade. The staff members were quite remarkable. They showed huge commitment and shared a strong, overriding belief that no one else should be blamed for the failure of these children. Their job was to help the pupils to succeed. Aspiration and ambition were made evident everywhere. To the British eye it was rather crude, but it had a remarkable effect on the children. Every classroom door was labelled with the year that the students would or should graduate. Teaching took place around the names of colleges. Students were reminded at every hour of the day of where they should set their sights for the future. These children literally used to stand a much higher chance of going to prison than to college. They would graduate to prison. But their whole outlook has been changed.
	Teaching was intensive and unforgiving of failure. Discipline was stunning, although caring and supportive. Perhaps what was most remarkable about this school was that every child participated in the school orchestra. It was the most superb orchestra I have ever heard and provided an opportunity to come together at the end of every school day. It also provided an activity because the play areas and gym facilities were nothing like those in our schools, even in our poorest ones. The school orchestra was used as a form of physical activity. The music was loud, with lots of bangs and getting up and down. As a by-product, maths attainment was also two grades ahead because of the strong link between music and maths.
	These children saw clearly that education was the only way out of the cycle of deprivation in which they and their families live, but they were also inspired by the ethos of the school and by the strong sense of support and love that was prevalent. That was the clear message I took from that school, as I have from strong schools in the UK. From day one, you have to set clear aspirations, create an environment where everyone focuses on the same ambitions, and where failure is quite simply not accepted. To do this, above all else we must invest in our head teachers and, indeed, in the whole teaching profession. I know that my noble friend Lord Puttnam has played a significant part in raising the profile, recruitment and standing of teaching and I warmly applaud him for that. The most vital task in the period ahead is to recruit, train, support and reward outstanding head teachers for our most difficult urban schools.
	Teaching in and leading schools in deprived communities is very challenging but, of course, hugely rewarding. Those who choose to work in these urban schools need and should expect strong support. Instead of that, they are often subjected to a barrage of media criticism. Even today when the tables are published in the papers, we see that the results for some of these schools are still poor, but progress is being made in most of them. I am afraid that the media response is not to applaud that progress, but just to criticise in a blanket way. That is totally deflating for those who have to keep going day after day in such schools.
	I hope very much that we in this House will give the level of political support that head teachers need and should expect from society as a whole. It is easy to criticise; it is much harder to provide sustained leadership for a school community. Great progress has been made in our education system over recent years, but we cannot take our collective foot off the pedal.

Lord Lucas: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for providing the opportunity to hold forth on education again. I am absolutely delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton. A dozen years ago I remember making speeches like that—perhaps not as good, but similar—from those Benches and getting an extremely hostile reception from these Benches. It is wonderful that things have moved on and we are now looking at a common set of ambitions, goals and assumptions. That makes progress much more possible because it gives the Government confidence that if they do things right, they will not immediately find their policies reversed by the next government. That is all to the good of pupils.
	I also enjoyed the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin. As a physicist myself, I think that it is nice when someone champions science, although I am worried about her references to "rocket science" and "bang goes the national curriculum". She and the pupils could be in trouble with the Terrorism Bill.
	The difficulty of science comes down, particularly, to the GCSE curriculum, which is incredibly boring. The way pupils achieve a good grade at GCSE science these days is to have a little pack of cards with facts on them; they memorise them and they get an A grade. It is absolutely simple, and it is boring. The science you are taught is science nobody needs to know; it has no relevance to life outside and the lives people lead. It is unsurprising that that theme has been echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and the right reverend Prelate. There is a real problem, a real disconnect between what children are taught for GCSE and what they really need and want to learn.
	The curriculum has been designed on an almost Platonic basis as "this ought to be what people learn". It does not address the fact that for every child who takes a GCSE and continues to follow that subject afterwards, there are five who do not. The curriculum entirely addresses the needs of those who are going on; it therefore leaves 80 per cent of pupils out in the cold. To my mind, a lot of the problems of discipline and disaffection flow from the flaws in the curriculum. An interesting illustration of that is that there is a school in England with a very high level of special needs, where last year, at least, 40 per cent of pupils got five A to C grades, but where there are no written school rules and no disciplinary problems. That is because the curriculum is absolutely centred on what the kids want to learn and is very heavily practical. That school is Brymore, in Bridgewater, if anybody wants to look it up.
	It illustrates that if children are learning what they want to learn, however disadvantaged and educationally challenged they are, they will behave. I have total sympathy with those faced with the GCSE, who say, "I do not want to know this." That is the way I feel about maths GCSE, which I have recently taken my kids through, when I look back on it. I have never used it. I have been a scientist, an accountant and a merchant banker, and very little of it was maths that I have used in life. So I think there is a lot to be done on that and I very much hope that at some stage the Government will turn their attention to it.
	What I want to talk about today is selection. In this country we have an almost entirely selective school system. Some of it is a little bit academic, but most of it is social. Some of it is directly social—largely in religious schools—but the great majority is geographically selective. As the Sutton Trust has demonstrated, the middle class has captured every form of selection going. Of course they have; they are bright, they are active and they care about their children's education. Of course they go all-out to get the best possible education for their children. We have allowed the system to be such that the middle class has effectively been able to exclude from the best schools in the country the disadvantaged 20 per cent, not because that is their objective, but because we have not produced a system that works any other way.
	The ambition we share on both sides of the House is that there should be good schools for all. Everybody should have the chance to go to a good school. Yes, there should be choice; it should be choice between good schools. There are different kinds of schools; parents want different kinds of education; children have different kinds of aptitudes and experiences and opportunities that they want to pursue. There is a great scope for variety, but there ought to be access to good schools for everybody. Despite what my noble friend Lady Shephard said, we can allow a little bit of social engineering, in that none of us really wants schools to be an engine for the ghettoisation of society. We want schools to be part of a cohesive society rather than one that produces a lot of little sub-groups which spend the rest of their lives at war with each other.
	Does the present system work or have any hope of working? No, I do not think it has. I do not like the grammar school system in Kent. I find it very destructive of the education of those who do not get into the grammar schools. It is very hard to find a good state education in Kent outside the grammar schools. It just does not seem to work in that way. The middle classes of course run across the border or buy private education, but it makes life extremely difficult for those who start out socially disadvantaged. I do not think the grammar schools, again to look at those in Kent, really flourish as schools. They become complacent, they do not go all-out for challenges like inclusion or broadening the curriculum. A lot of them are quite narrow and relatively uninteresting schools. Looking at them from my point of view as publisher of the Good Schools Guide, we do not include many of them.
	I do not think that is the answer and nor do I think that geographically selective schools are the answer. They are very easy for the middle class to navigate, but geographical selection is enormously effective in keeping the disadvantaged out. You can just do it by house price and draw the maps so that they cannot get in. I do not think that any of the current systems of selection work.
	I do not think, either, that abolishing selection is an attractive idea. The only proposal I have heard for that is admission by ballot. That has an enormous collection of disadvantages. First, how do you handle the fact that everybody would go for the same schools? There is no reason why the ballot should be evenly spread; you might have schools where 20,000 people apply for 200 places and no applications elsewhere. There is no regulation. As soon as you start to introduce regulation, you are introducing geographical selection again. It is uncertain; parents do not know what is going to happen so it is an unfriendly system from a parental point of view; and it is destructive of community. I do not think that is a road to go down either.
	I do think that we can learn a lesson from Adam Smith's book and harness our natural self-interest to be the engine of a system that would work much better for the whole community. We can do that by seeing selection as a means to an end. What selection does is create character in a school. If you have a sufficient number of Catholics in a school, it becomes a Catholic school and it will have the virtues of a Catholic school; it will be the kind of education that has a particular attraction to particular parents and particular children. The same applies to academic selection, certainly as practised by specialist schools. If you want a school that is good at languages you need a sufficient cohort of pupils who are good at and interested in languages, otherwise it is extremely difficult to maintain. There is certainly a home for geographical selection because it allows a school to be part of a community. That, I think is enormously valuable; a school is a very important part of a community and we ought not to lose geographical selection from that point of view.
	I find selection a very useful tool in creating a variety of schools and in maintaining character, but it must not be allowed to go too far. I think we have let it go too far; I think we should row back on it. We should say that all selective schools, which effectively means all schools, because there is selection of one kind or another, must admit a proportion of children by ballot. Ballot is the simplest and cleanest system. You might get up to 25 per cent quite happily. I do not think this destroys the character of a school. I do not think Ampleforth is less Catholic because 40 per cent of its pupils are not Catholics. I do not think Eton, in the days when I was there, was a less academic school because it was not particularly selective.
	So long as you have a cohort who maintain the ethos of a school and that is a settled ethos, you can accommodate a very substantial proportion of pupils who do not share that particular aptitude or background. I think that would give pupils a real opportunity to move across borders and to access the opportunities now closed to them, whether it is getting into the grammar school, which is next door but closed to them because their 11-plus results were not quite good enough; or getting into that school in the smart suburb when you live in the high-rises next door. A mixed application of selection and ballot would result in opportunities that are just not there and will not be under any system that we are likely to reach under this Government for broadening the social intake of all schools.
	As a Conservative, I would move further. I would want to accommodate the right reverend Prelate and allow him to establish his school, not with an LEA's permission but where he saw the opportunity. I do not see why LEAs should act as gatekeepers to stop such an enterprise. I do not see this Government, who, after all, have been with us for quite a long time, taking that step but I hope that I can persuade them to open up our selective system and allow access to the less privileged.

Lord Dearing: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, for initiating this debate. For once in my life, instead of concentrating on what I wanted to say, I have been listening to the noble Baroness and all the other speakers with respect and have learnt a lot. I am sure that the Minister has been listening equally carefully.
	I want to concentrate my remarks on the October White Paper. As I read and re-read it, it seemed to be written by people with commitment, passion and vision. I have never doubted any government's commitment to education. I have been particularly impressed that, since 1997, we have got an extra 40,000 teachers and the number of teaching assistants has doubled to 200,000. Putting people into schools is very impressive, much more so for me than the commitment to redo over the next 15 years all our secondary schools and half the primary schools. That is also impressive, but the point has been made that it is the people who make a school and make education, and that is where resources mainly must go.
	I have been impressed by the Government's decision to make available £335 million by 2007–08 for teaching in small groups in secondary schools and particularly for catch-up classes in the first year for those who are behind. However, while there has been a commitment and resources have increasingly been made available, I see in the White Paper the concern and the admission that the difference between those born to succeed in education and those who start at a disadvantage has not been made good. As the White Paper says at section 1.24, the attainment gap for pupils has not narrowed. That is tragic. It is a scandal that, in spite of all our effort and commitment, those born to have least in life through education are the ones least likely to succeed. The figures are quoted: around 25 per cent of our kids leave primary school without the basic kit in literacy and numeracy to take advantage of their secondary education—what a disaster—and 85 per cent of those will end up without the magic five A to C grade GCSEs.
	Then you look at the figures for some sections of our community: working-class white boys, children whose parents are from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and black Caribbean boys, of whom only 17 per cent get five decent GCSEs. We must be concerned about that. I warmed to the White Paper because it shows concern about those people and a commitment to do something about it.
	I looked carefully through the proposals because I have one hobby horse: before a government introduce a policy, they should validate it, and the best way to do that is to pilot it. I counted that they have piloted, or are piloting, seven of their specific proposals relevant to improving performance.
	Although I find the proposals to deal with structure bold and the kind of thinking that we need to break the mould, I did not find evidence that they had been validated and tested. Those proposals include, for example, a new role for local authorities, which are to be commissioners, referees and parents' champions rather than providers. It would comfort me if, before moving further on those proposals, the Government found some likeminded local authorities willing to pilot and test them against pre-stated criteria to see whether they deliver the goods. We have a code of good practice for admissions; I want a code of good practice for governments on validating change before making it. We are talking about the future of kids where for decades we have not solved their problems. Before making changes we must ensure that they will work for those kids.
	I have a personal belief, shared, I think, by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, that great teachers will do the trick but they need freedoms. I notice that on trust schools, which I am glad to see are being piloted, there is a proposal that, with the Secretary of State's consent, they may get extra-curricular freedoms. That is good because I am not sure that lads and lasses whose parents have perhaps come from a village in Pakistan or Bangladesh will be inspired by learning about how the Romans came and then the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. However, they might be inspired by looking at the history of the Olympic movement, since it is coming to this country, and its standards and aspirations, which they can see as part of their lives. If there is the prospect, on application to the Secretary of State, of extra-curricular freedoms for trust schools, why not for all schools where they are needed and will help teachers to deliver?
	I particularly welcome the improvement partner—I have forgotten the exact term but every school is to have one. They are needed most in the schools with the greatest problems. If I could, I would give every one of them a Marie Stubbs. I do not whether all noble Lords know Dame Marie Stubbs; she is a very remarkable person who turns schools round. We need people like her.
	The Government rightly talk of their determination to deal with underperformance by schools. The Audit Commission, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, referred, makes the case that we cannot allow children to be disadvantaged by bad schools. I have said it before and I will say it again to the noble Baroness: I am with you. However, I am not so keen on deciding that closure is the best answer. I do not think that the Government are saying that either but I have had experience of closing an underperforming school and going through what is involved in re-opening. It absorbed so much of the senior staff's energy and the governing body was overwhelmed by it. Meanwhile, the school was plodding on, almost waiting. The best approach would be to put in the back-up resources an, if need be, change the head teacher and senior staff to turn the place round. That is where the action takes place, rather than through procedures. I am concerned that areas of deprivation should continue to have their school as a centre of regeneration and renewal for the community rather than it being shut down, with the risk of that community going on the bus—on pre-paid fares—to a school in a middle class area. I want them to have a good education, but it is much better to create community commitment to the school and education.
	The right reverend Prelate referred to the Church's attitude. He picked in particular the possibility of inter-faith or joint-faith schools. I welcome that, and perhaps trust that schools are a way forward for developing that possibility. That would make them not faith schools but schools where people of faith come together, including at the heart of the governing body. That is something new for the Churches and faith groups to develop.
	I have spoken about the curriculum, teachers and new buildings. On admissions, I like the boldness of the Government's thinking on local authorities but am not clear how it is going to work, particularly with admissions. I worry that the middle classes will work the system rather than parents who have themselves failed in education. I know the Government have in mind that parents should have support from the local authorities; I have one suggestion that may help them, in the context of the school profile, which is part of the innovation. I was engaged in writing a report for the government back in 1993, in which I advocated the argument that schools were there to add value, and that the best measure of performance was value added. It would be helpful to the parents of kids who do not look like doing well if their school profiles could declare for, say, children who had not achieved level 1 in key stage 1, how they had improved in performance by the end of key stage 2, and similarly, for a secondary school, for those who have come in with, say, level 2 or less in English and maths, how they had done by the end of key stage 3. Parents could then look not at who is top of the GCSE league, but at which schools are good at caring for and helping kids like theirs.
	The main point for the Minister is yes, be bold, but test the ground first. You have the futures of our kids in your hands.

Baroness Massey of Darwen: My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, has secured this debate. Like the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, I am enjoying the many excellent speeches—I am sure with more to come. It is a great pleasure to talk about schools; it is one of my favourite topics. Indeed, were I not standing here today there is no place I would rather be than in front of a class of young people in a school somewhere. For about 20 years I taught French and health education—a strange combination—mainly in inner London comprehensive schools, where I was a senior teacher and then an advisor. Today I will raise a few initial points, then move on to describe some conversations I have had recently with head teachers and classroom teachers about how they see the state of our schools.
	This Government have done more than any other to improve the lot of children. The seminal document Every Child Matters, setting out the five outcomes desirable for children, is aspirational and inspirational. The Children Act should result in better support for families and children who have the problems of deprivation described so eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp. The youth Green Paper sets out positive directions, as does the 10-year strategy for learning. There are many other reports I could mention. The drive is to not only to protect children but to enable them to gain self-esteem and self-confidence—surely the heart of any success, be it academic or social. There has been a commitment to raise children and families out of poverty, and improve their lives; Sure Start has sought to enable parents in difficult circumstances to be able to deal more positively with their children, and its impact is still to be seen.
	I was at school a long way from Eton and not far from where the noble Baroness on the Opposition Bench was at school. It was in a largely working-class area. I went to the local grammar school where the top stream out of three went on to higher education if they were lucky. Many were not lucky, largely due to a lack of aspiration for them from school and parents, and their own perception of their ability and worth. This experience made me into a teacher, with the sure knowledge that things could be done better. They are being done better. I do not want just to focus on academic performance—education is far more than academic performance. We must focus on making every school a good school, open to all children in a community. Many people have spoken about the importance of community.
	We all know what makes a good school; that was referred to by my noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton. It is about strong leadership, a vision for the school, clear goals, good and dedicated teachers supported by good management, a programme of personal, social and health education as well as a range of formal subjects, and the encouragement of aspiration, motivation and self-discipline, with parental involvement and support where possible. External support from an LEA or from expert advice is also valuable. The Audit Office report on improving poorly performing schools, mentioned by several noble Lords, recognises much of this. The report attracted headlines described by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, such as,
	"A million pupils failed by schools".
	Behind the headlines, the report also states that the number of poorly performing schools is reducing, GCSE and equivalent performance in England has improved, and more primary schools are achieving basic numeracy and literacy skills.
	I suspect that many pupils fail in schools because they are being failed long before they get to school. Schools have a difficult job in trying to make up for that deficit. Some of the pupils who enter the primary school where I am a governor do not know what a book is, let alone how to turn a page. Some are aggressive toward staff and other children, and have poor social skills. My school is a difficult one, with high levels of poverty and deprivation, and 60 different languages, set in a housing estate in Wandsworth. Yet, the school has those good qualities I described earlier, with a focus on social development. Many children are helped to achieve their potential. Whether this continues into their secondary school, I do not know. We certainly have to look at what happens in the crucial transfer from primary to secondary school.
	My school is a strong part of the community. Assistants come from within the community, as do many of the teachers. The school has never been vandalised, despite its setting. Every community should have a good school, and every school should involve the community. It is known from research that being part of a community decreases the likelihood in young people of risk-taking and anti-social behaviour.
	I want to say a word on the controversial White Paper for schools: some of it is good, and some of it I have serious concerns about. The White Paper is for the future, whatever that means, and I am talking about now. Let me share with your Lordships some of the things that teachers and head teachers have told me. Of course they have criticisms, but they largely feel that education in schools has improved over the past 10 years. They speak of steady improvement in the professionalism and accountability of the education service. They speak of the consolidation of the national curriculum, a curriculum of entitlement for all pupils, and a curriculum for the foundation stage of schooling. They speak of the establishment of understood national levels of pupil attainment at the end of each key stage, and the obligation to report on attainment and record pupil progress. They speak of the establishment of SEN legislation and provision beyond mainstream funding. They refer also to the improvement of the careers service with the establishment of Connexions and to the recognition that, with funding, additional support can bring about improved pupil outcomes, for example, through Sure Start, after and before school clubs, holiday activity programmes and out of school activities. They refer also to the provision of an extended curriculum to complement the basic curriculum and to personal, social and health education and citizenship, which I was delighted to hear the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford discuss, although I wish that citizenship and personal, social and health education were part of the statutory curriculum. They refer to the national healthy school standard award, which in my school has involved the community—parents, grandparents, local industry, the police and so on.
	Those people refer to improved pay and conditions for teachers and to the establishment of teaching assistants who can deal with small groups in classrooms. They refer to improvements to initial teacher training and the acceptance by the profession of improvement through inspection, reporting and action planning. They refer to the primary strategy, Excellence and Enjoyment, which improves on the literacy and numeracy strategy by making it more creative. They refer to the use of information technology and to the recognition that continuing professional development and attention to the school leadership role for heads, deputies and senior staff is important. I could go on.
	Much good practice has developed. A friend of mine, who was the head teacher of a local community school, instituted an access class for pupils arriving from primary schools who have weak skills in literacy and numeracy. The mornings for that group of pupils were taken up with basic skill learning with primary school teachers in the classroom. They were more than catch-up classes. My friend reported that the impact on achievement and the cutting of potential behaviour problems were enormous. My question for the Minister is: how is good practice such as this shared between schools? Is there a formal procedure? Are there informal procedures? If there are no procedures, could we have some?
	Again, I am grateful for this debate. We are all keen to improve performance in schools. How we do that will be discussed in more detail in the coming months, but it is certain that a good experience in school contributes to a motivated and a civilised society.

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, for finding time to introduce this debate and for doing it so well. For all the reasons given, we are in her debt. It is also the reason that this, if I may say so, motley crew of party politicians, education gurus and specialists and, as in my case, the odd education "anorak", are here enjoying once more the sharing of insights, and hearing and learning. We thank the noble Baroness for that.
	I think it is agreed on all sides of the House—I certainly agree—that there has been progress in our school system. I consider that this progress has occurred over the past 15 years, at least. There has been real progress, particularly in primary schools. Sure Start is currently moving that forward very significantly. There has been progress—I pay tribute here to what used to be called the TTA—in the recruitment and training of science teachers. That is immensely important for reasons that have been given. There has also been progress in many individual schools which have moved away from the band of what used to be called failing schools. There has definitely been progress. But, of course, there is agreement that there is never enough progress. We are insatiable—especially those of us who are involved in education—and rightly so. Progress is still on the way; it is on the stocks; it is happening, but it has to move further.
	I draw your Lordships' attention to the conditions that have led to some of the progress and the platform on which progress has been made over the past at least 15 years. I believe in the development of a national curriculum—not an interfering and over-detailed one, as it may have been in some cases—as an entitlement. It gives an entitlement to all school pupils that they ought to have as the basis of a good education. I believe in national testing and in the measurement of attainment so that we can see what is happening in the system. That, again, is part of the basis for progress. I believe in national inspection—I have declared my interest in that many times in this House—published reports and a template of inspection that can be understood throughout the nation. I believe also in increased national funding for schools. It does not do this by itself but often it can make the difference to a school that is in difficulty or struggling.
	However, we should note that in all these conditions for progress the word "national" occurs. That is good; it was necessary and it had to happen. The school system had to be seen in a broad national context. However, the fact that these stimuli of progress have the word "national" attached to them has consequences. There are positive consequences in that education is now high in the national consciousness, and that is a good thing. There is public debate and it can be informed debate. It is not always informed debate but it can be. The availability of information and the capacity to see what is going on across the nation help inform that debate. It helps debates here, widely in the public arena and in government. There are national measures of what progress ought to include, although those are not the sole measures. This national emphasis provides the possibility of making diagnoses at national level about what is happening in the system as well as in individual schools. However, there have been negative consequences. I want to draw attention to those because the tension between the positive and the negative consequences is the proper focus of much of our attention and is the point at which disagreements occur.
	The most difficult negative consequence for me is that this emphasis on the national has led to action and planning that are based on a one-size-fits-all mentality and approach. That is the downside of basing things so clearly on national statistics and national reports. That measure has led to—this is also a negative consequence—the danger of detaching education strategy and direction from local context. In some cases, that has been the real effect of it. Contexts are different and areas have different problems. Unfortunately, it has resulted also in the disenchantment of many teachers. They feel that the initiative has been taken from them as regards delivering what they do best, and as regards what was the object of their profession and, indeed, calling. Not long ago I met a fellow pupil from my state primary and my secondary school. According to all that I heard, he was a very good maths teacher in a school in the east of Scotland. I asked him how his job was going. He had been at the game for more than 30 years. He replied, "I still love it". Like the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, he still enjoyed standing in front of a class. However, he added, "But they are on my back. They won't let me get on with teaching. They are for ever having a new initiative, a new set of forms to fill in and a new set of procedures". He knew what teaching was about and he was a good maths teacher, but he is an example of the disenchantment of teachers. In some ways the worst consequence of what I have described is that we have had serial national initiatives ever since. That is a great danger and this addiction that we seem to have is disturbing the profession.
	If these negative consequences are the result of good initiatives—I believe that they were good initiatives—what are we to do about them? I have a specific suggestion. I see signs of this in the White Paper, but I will not comment on it in detail. I urge that we move from paying proper attention to the profile of individual schools to requiring a plan from them on how they are to deliver in their community, catchment area and arena the education objectives that we all share. Sorry, this sounds like another national initiative but I will qualify its impact. We should recognise that there would be positive consequences of their being asked to do that. First, it then becomes a responsibility of the schools once again to say, "This is the need that our community and the pupils in this school have". That may be different from the very specific needs of other areas. Indeed, as you travel round the country, you discover that they are different.
	Once again the initiative would be given to teachers, head teachers and governors. The responsibility would clearly lie with schools to say, "This is how we see the developments taking place".
	I would go further and say that school plans should be a factor in funding, because this in the end is the stimulus that everyone pays attention to. If there is to be, and there has been, additional funding for schools across the country, perhaps some of the additional money could be attached to the quality of the plan that the school comes up with and to the difficulties that the school is now clearly perceived to be facing and that are not necessarily shared by other schools. In other words, instead of a percentage per pupil type of formula, an element of the funding formula would be the plan, what it reveals about the school and the confidence of the funder—I will come back to that in a moment—in the ability of the school to deliver.
	A benefit of this is that it would focus the provision of education in that community and catchment area. Many of my noble colleagues have made such reference, but there are areas of deprivation in our land. Of course there are. If you look up the statistics, the areas of deprivation include poor school performance, poor health, poor employment, difficulty in longevity, difficulty with housing and so on. They all go together. They are in the same postcodes.
	I am not suggesting that it is the role of schools to solve the problems of the whole community. They cannot do that. That is not their job. They do not have the expertise or the funds. What I am suggesting is that a proper educational question in that school is, granted these circumstances, how to deliver the shared objectives. That is what the plan would focus on.
	There are differences, which are not simply a matter of the deprivation indices I referred to. Some schools, as we know well, have many languages to cope with, some only one. That makes a difference to what the educational provision and practise should be. Some have high incidence of turnover, sometimes because of immigration, sometimes because they are on the route of travelling communities. That raises a series of different questions. How do you deliver education to a pupil who might be there every year for a few months, then off again? If your school has that as part of its catchment, your plan should reflect the fact; I also refer to different ethnic and cultural groups—again reference has been made to them—and parenting.
	If I have a fault with the White Paper, it is that it sometimes delivers too much confidence in terms of what parents will deliver. As we have said several times in the debate, parents in middle class areas will deliver exceptionally well. If you talk to head teachers in areas of great difficulty, many of them will tell you that their problem is finding a parent. Sometimes there are not any, sometimes there is only one, sometimes there is a changing team, but getting them into the school and interested in their children is a major problem. Such a school should reflect that in its school plan. The good ones do, but they are doing it on the margins; they are not doing it with the help of the community or, possibly, of the funders.
	The benefits of such a plan would be in taking these factors into account and in looking at the way the school might deliver. A plan sets national aspirations in a local context. I wholly agree with the sorts of proposals my good friend, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, was making about the need for initiatives in the area of faith schools. This would be precisely one way in which this could be carried through—by allowing and supporting funding to follow plans to deal with this. Lastly, although I cannot deal with this now, there is the possibility of syndicate plans, covering more than one school, where areas need the co-operation of several schools if their difficulties are to be met.
	In summary, school plans are a way ahead and need to be examined further. Not all are ready, and this is where piloting would be very important. It might well be that we look to pilot examples of how this is to be done and developed. This too would be a way in which the Government could look at the question of how funding might be delivered.
	Many will say that the great risk of the proposal is anarchy. The plans have to be evaluated and funding set alongside them. There are only two options: one is the LEAs and the other is what I would refer to as a federal funding council—"federal" for obvious reasons, which I cannot spell out now. One or other would have to be chosen. Inspection would be against the plan, and that would be a specific and helpful focus for inspectors. Most importantly, it is a move from "one size fits all" and the search for the holy grail of another serial initiative.

Lord Puttnam: My Lords, may I add my thanks to those of earlier speakers to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, for making today's refreshing debate possible. I have to confess to being a long-time admirer of the noble Baroness and I know that I speak for many others on these Benches when I say that she is a significant and welcome addition to the membership of this House.
	First of all, I shall set out where I think we have got to in achieving an objective that we all share, that of creating a world-class educational opportunity for all our young people. Eight and a half years ago, with no previous experience and enormous apprehension, I went to work with the Department for Education and Skills. My principal role was to get out and about and to discover at first hand the principal day-to-day concerns of the teaching profession, and to attempt accurately to relay the voice of the staff room back to the department. Some 400 school visits later, I can say without any fear of informed contradiction that nothing short of a transformation has taken place in the classroom, and indeed staff room, of most—I emphasise most—of the schools in England.
	Are there still problems? Of course there are. Have we moved as far or as quickly as I would have hoped? Of course we have not. It was interesting to find many of those disappointments and anxieties reflected in the forthcoming education White Paper. I am sure that Members of this House look forward to Second Reading and the chance to both praise and, if necessary, criticise whatever Bill eventually reaches us.
	But please believe me when I assure noble Lords that, certainly when viewed from the more apolitical chalk face, a transformation there has been. I thought that the noble Baroness, in introducing the debate, went quite a long way in generously acknowledging that fact. Time does not permit me to go into as much detail as I wish, so in the hope that you will accept my assertion, I will focus on just two moving targets, which I think deserve rather more debate and discussion than they would appear at present to be receiving.
	First is the overhasty—in my judgment—and politically driven abandonment of last year's Tomlinson report. You will remember that these were the recommendations covering the future of education from 14 to 19. The recommendations sent a clear signal that the future lay in the adoption of the IB or a comprehensive diploma or bac in substitution for our present system of A-levels. To anyone who had taken the trouble to study the challenges that are likely to face the young people of this country over the next 10 or 20 years, the logic underpinning the Tomlinson recommendations was compelling. Sadly, it proved even more irresistibly compelling to score a few opportunistic political points in the run-up to the election. Both major parties, I am afraid, have to accept a level of blame in this respect. As ever, opportunism won out over principle, and Tomlinson was quietly shelved, at what may well prove to be great cost to a generation of young people.
	The important point here is that the report was shelved, not binned, and certainly not intellectually discredited. When the Minister comes to reply, it is my sincerest hope that he might offer some encouragement regarding the possibility of a rethink, and that this time the Government will refuse to be blown off course by any kind of rent-a-crowd media hysteria.
	Personally, I would lay a dime to a dollar that the gold standard we were last year being urged to cling to will within 20 years—just one generation—have turned to dross. If we fail to act, the following scenario becomes all too likely: the most forward-thinking and adventurous schools will slowly just peel away from the A-level syllabus, offering instead their customised version of the IB. Any number of university admissions officers, when pressed, will already tell you that they are finding IB students an increasingly attractive proposition, certainly from the perspective of teaching and learning. The likely result will be that the best schools will become ever more successful, through offering their students the curriculum and therefore the learning skills that most employers and increasing numbers of people in higher education are already actively seeking. That could turn very rapidly into a two-tier system; if you like, a form of selection into HE, but this time with knobs on.
	Needless to say, there are no problem-free options. If we are to return to nurturing the type of scholarship demanded by the IB, our teaching professionals need to have far higher levels of subject-based professional development, certainly sufficient to ensure that their knowledge and skills are continually updated. At present, that is far from being the case, as was touched on by my noble friend Lady Morgan of Drefelin. Currently, something less than 8 per cent of teaching professionals have any form of higher degree, and over 50 per cent confirm that they have received no subject-based in-service training in the past five years. Surely in most subjects that cannot be remotely acceptable. It is also a pretty dismal reflection on our progress in education since the James report in 1971, which recommended:
	"Throughout their careers, teachers should have the time, space and funding to reflect, research and develop their own practice".
	I cannot be the only person to have noticed that, 35 years later, many of those are concepts that have been enthusiastically taken on board by the commercial private sector but have failed to take root in the very sector at which they were specifically aimed. In fairness, a number of schemes and initiatives are attempting to address the issue, but most of them fall somewhat short of what is really needed.
	Everything that I learnt during my years as chairman of the General Teaching Council and in countless discussions in staff rooms up and down the country leads me to believe that, to maintain the high standards expected by parents and young people, continuing professional development must be part of each and every teacher's contractual entitlement. Whichever way we choose to go with the curriculum, the quality of teaching, as has been said by any number of noble Lords this afternoon, will continue to be defined by the knowledge, the training and the professional development of the individual practitioner. Devolving responsibility for training to individual schools was not in itself a bad idea, but sadly it has not worked. There has been too much fragmentation, too many one-day or even half-day courses, many of them cancelled at the last minute due to lack of adequate staff cover. This is too serious an issue for the haphazard, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach that has proved to be the norm.
	In his response I very much hope that the Minister will agree that the time has come for a new and comprehensive approach to subject-based professional development—a rather more committed approach, and one that can this time be endorsed by the entire profession.
	I wonder whether the Minister agrees that the success or otherwise of this country will be determined not on the playing fields of Eton but in the classroom of every single school—primary and secondary—up and down the country. This belief has now become something of a commonplace, but what does not seem to have been fully absorbed is the very real financial implication of this challenge. Significantly greater resources will have to be poured into education if we are to remain a genuinely first-class nation. It does not matter which party is in government; that will continue to be the case. As the Prime Minister once memorably put it, much has been done, but much, much more has to be done. I confess that the second "much" is mine, but it is that additional "much" that will be essential if education in this country is to really be a success story.
	We have heard some wonderful speeches this afternoon, but the speech of my noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton was quite remarkable. In it, she took us into that school in the Bronx, and invited us to see what magic looks and feels like. I looked around the Chamber when she was describing the potency and power of the school orchestra, and every noble Lord in the Chamber was nodding. We all know that to be the case; we all know that if you go into a school with a wonderful orchestra or a wonderful choir, that school will be successful. Why? We could easily spend another debate discussing that. This form of education is labour-intensive, capital-intensive and time-intensive. It requires real money. I very much hope that this Government, my Government, have the courage to understand that they must go the extra mile if they want to have the education service that we all dream of.

Lord Clarke of Hampstead: My Lords, I add my grateful thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, for this debate. As someone with very poor education, I have found it fascinating for the past couple of hours to hear experts from various parts of the education system of this country.
	When Labour won the election in 1997, many people, myself included, were both excited and delighted that the Prime Minster spoke so movingly in a visionary way about the new Government's determination to place education at the very top of the many social and domestic issues that they were addressing. In fact, it was clear to the whole world that he considered education to be a priority issue.
	Since coming to power, the Government have fulfilled their pledge to bring fairness and opportunity to the nation's children. From time to time, some of the proposals and subsequent changes have met with criticism and opposition, but that is the nature of our society. If we agree and give support to proposals, it is our right to do so. If there are those who, either as individuals or through political activity, disagree, that is equally acceptable.
	Where I part company from some of the loud voices who seem to oppose almost everything that the Government propose is when that opposition is for opposition's sake, not on the merits of any particular suggestion. I draw the distinction between simply opposing and legitimate debate—argument, compromise or accommodation—because the major task of seeking improvement in our schools and in places of further education should have at its heart the real needs of our children and young people. I have no doubt that everyone in this House will agree that the educational needs of our young must be paramount.
	My contribution to the debate is to comment on two parts of the White Paper. First, there is the question of parental involvement; secondly, I have a brief comment on the policy Building Schools for the Future. It is my firm belief that children are more likely to achieve higher standards where there is real encouragement in the home. I am more than aware of the difficulties that face families who are poorly housed and living in overcrowded conditions. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, of some of those problems, and from other noble Lords in this debate. Having lived on a housing estate and represented such families as a councillor and seen the lack of parental interest, I know just how difficult it is to get people to take some part in their children's educational needs.
	I was very encouraged by the Government's aspirations in the White Paper published last October. It illustrates very clearly the role that parents could play in driving improvement in schools. It deals with the rights of parents to receive termly—I had not heard that word before I read the White Paper, but it is all education—information on the school's progress together with the opportunity to have face-to-face discussion with schools. Schools will be expected to use home-school agreements to agree concrete commitments about how schools and parents can work together. Parents who want to complain about any concerns that they have will have the right to complain to Ofsted.
	There will be a requirement for all governing bodies to seek and respond to the views of parents, with an encouragement for them to establish parent councils. Tailored information will be provided to parents when their child starts primary school and when their child moves from primary to secondary education. The whole of chapter 5 is well worth studying. Whatever political arguments may or may not take place on a number of related issues, the role of the parent is crucial to a child's progress on the ladder of education.
	I welcome the initiatives that can assist parents in playing a part in the education of their children. I just wish that there was a greater effort to foster their necessary involvement. I have a real concern—it has been mentioned before—that, in many homes, guidance at a young age is simply not there. Of course, there are countless thousands if not millions of parents who recognise the need for early at-home support. My concern is for those who do not have the active involvement of their parents. Outside the debates on whether to select, we should all ask the Government to give more attention to the guidance given to parents in many of our communities, which would help to encourage a more constructive entry into education.
	Having had a very limited education myself, I literally thank God for having had parents who, although they themselves had few educational opportunities, fulfilled an educational role for me, my late brother and my younger sister. They taught us to read before we started school. It was an investment that helped all three of us. My mother gave us great encouragement. She said, "You can have the light on all night, provided you are reading". It was a thing that stayed in your mind—her coming in saying, "Are you asleep yet?", and us saying "No!"—whether that was Richmal Crompton, Arthur Ransome or many other authors who inspired and gave such encouragement to us as children. I wish that we could do more to get parents involved.
	Times are different now, and many parents are hard-pushed to pay the rent or mortgage. There is the ease with which some parents can switch the television on. There should be no blame attached to them. The society that we have created does not help those who must struggle against the enormous odds they encounter on some housing estates which I know—areas ridden with crime and deprivation. We cannot blame people for lacking the initiative and gumption to do a bit more about their own children's education. Yet no debate on education should lose sight of the real and desperate problems which some parents have to face. To become more involved in their children's schools is an option not easily available to them. That is why I welcome the Government's co-ordinated approach, and its attempts to improve areas through the urban renewal and Elevate regeneration programmes.
	My second point, which I will touch on briefly, is government policy via Building Schools for the Future. I should declare an interest in that I have been appointed by Lancashire County Council to chair the staffing commission that is dealing with such requirements for the Burnley element of the Lancashire project. I would like to remind your Lordships that the Department for Education and Skills has approved £170 million of capital investment to replace 11 secondary schools in Burnley and Pendle, with eight new schools—six in Burnley and two in Pendle. That project is recognised as a pathfinder authority and has secured new build for all work, so could be seen as some sort of pilot scheme. Anyway, people up in Lancashire are getting on with it and that government approach, recognising the need for real and proper investment in Burnley and Pendle, is much to be welcomed.
	The project has received, and will continue to receive, support from the Burnley and Pendle borough councils, the Burnley Action Partnership, strategic partnerships and many other local community groups. When the go-ahead was obtained, Janet Newton, the project director for Lancashire County Council, said in a message to the people of Burnley and Pendle:
	"As we move into the detailed planning of the new schools, we will all continue working together to ensure that pupils receive the best possible education in modern . . . buildings".
	While the big political guns continue to make a lot of noise, I hope that we can all recognise the exciting future that awaits pupils because of government policies that demonstrate, by action, the real care and concern that they have for the educational needs of the nation's children.

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, I too wish to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold. She has enabled us to have an interesting and wide-ranging debate at a time when what happens in our schools could not be more topical. As a scientist, I particularly agree with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, about science education, with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford about citizenship—on which I look forward to an opportunity to say more in two weeks' time—and with the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, about the fact that size and music matter.
	Taking the long view, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, and others that education is the key way to promote equality of opportunity, and central to reducing poverty and deprivation. It should be a service for all children, accountable to whole communities, and should hang together as a whole—albeit containing healthy diversity, with schools co-operating and working together for the sake of their community rather than fighting each other. That is how standards can be driven up.
	A good school at the heart of every community; that is what we in this House share as a common objective. That should help children achieve all five outcomes set out in Every Child Matters, not just academic achievement to the exclusion of all else. Fortunately, many schools do just that and I pay tribute to them. We also believe that schools are far too controlled by Whitehall. That is the yoke from which they need to be set free, not from the control of their locally elected representatives. Yet the Government propose yet more nationalisation through the power of the new schools commissioner.
	However, turning to the short view, the recent White Paper represents a terribly wasted opportunity to raise standards. With school rolls predicted by the Audit Commission to fall by half a million over the next 10 years, the opportunity to provide more personal attention to children, by reducing class sizes, should be seized not squandered. Otherwise these surplus places will cost the taxpayer millions without any real benefit to our children. Yet the Government want to add to that surplus by encouraging new providers to create more places, even where no demand has been demonstrated or there is already excess capacity.
	Real parental choice can easily be achieved where there is excess capacity. But instead we are promised parental choice through more structural change and new providers. While we on these Benches do not oppose new entrants into the provision of schools, it must be done in a way that does not undermine fair admissions and local accountability.
	Of course we must seek to improve standards and ensure that no child is left behind, but it is not by constant fiddling about with structures that we will achieve that. It is, as my noble friend Lady Sharp and the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, by giving them a good start, identifying problems early and providing a wide, relevant and stimulating choice of curriculum, especially for 14 to 19 year olds. In that, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. It is by supporting schools and providing adequate resources for learning and good quality teaching, and by developing management and leadership skills among our senior teachers, as many noble Lords have said.
	The idea that the new trust schools proposed in the White Paper would increase parental choice is preposterous. On the Liberal Democrat Benches, we support those measures that give parents more information and involve them more in the life of the school. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Hampstead, that children thrive when their parents are really involved in their education. Yet much of that motherhood and apple pie stuff is already being done in the best schools. I doubt that it needs legislation; it merely needs spreading of best practice, and I endorse the questions of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, about that.
	Most references to parental choice in the White Paper are pie in the sky, and cruelly mislead parents. In reality, oversubscribed schools choose their pupils; parents do not choose them. We oppose reduced parental choice where a majority of parents are not allowed to stop a governing body voting to become a foundation or trust school, and cannot opt for a new school to be a community school. The words "parental choice" should stick in the throat of the Government, who have legislated to ensure that academies do not have to take any child with special needs whose parents want it to attend. The long-winded and expensive dispute resolution service that has been set up will find itself with little to do. Advice lines are already finding that parents soon give up trying to exert their rather non-existent rights when they realise how little their child is wanted by the school. Is it any wonder, given the confusion and complexity that will arise if every school becomes its own admissions authority, that the Government see the need to set up "choice advisers" to help disadvantaged people understand the admissions process?
	Unfair proposals on admissions are, of course, at the heart of objections to the White Paper, so heartily supported by the Conservative Party. Does that not ring alarm bells in the corridors of power at No. 10, even if the fact escapes them that a clear majority of their own Back-Benchers, their own Deputy Prime Minister, a former party leader and a former Secretary of State for Education oppose these measures? This White Paper is Tony Blair's epitaph; his Mozart's Requiem—the thing that he must see through before he dies a political death. I wonder whether, like that wonderful musical epitaph, it was commissioned by an anonymous stranger in a black cloak, perhaps one who habitually occupies the government Front Bench in your Lordships' House when education is on the agenda.
	The Opposition's agenda is clearly, first, to embarrass the Government and, secondly, to reintroduce selection and the unfairness of their own grant-maintained system back to the future of our schools. Your Lordships heard that here today from the noble Baroness who introduced the debate. They are happy because the White Paper's admissions free-for-all will surely produce selection by the back door. In a situation where the resources that follow a child with special needs are as inadequate as they are today, after eight years of Labour government, no school in its right mind is going to be keen to allow too many of them in if they can avoid it. Situations arise like the one I heard about only this week, where two severely autistic children are holding a school in a very deprived area to ransom by behaviour which the school does not have the knowledge, skills or resources to handle. The rights of these two needy children, and those of all the others whose education is harmed by the attention staff have to pay them, are being infringed by this Government's failure properly to provide for their needs. In such an environment, the measures relating to trust schools are downright dangerous to the whole edifice of our education system.
	We on these Benches believe that collaboration rather than competition is the right model to drive up standards, not setting school against school against the wishes of the local community. The trust model proposed in the White Paper seems to offer only one attraction to a school—to become its own admissions authority. Why else should it want to do that? The Government have made it clear on the record many times that there will be no financial incentives. However, I say to noble Lords, watch this space for a U-turn. The Government have a nasty habit of ensuring that if you do what they want, you get extra money. For example, today you can have extra money for any kind of brand new school you want—as long as it is an academy.
	The Minister's mantra that trust status promotes innovation, diversity and builds a school ethos has no evidence base and we are not alone in opposing these measures. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, about the need to validate new ideas. The Secondary Heads Association, the NUT, the Audit Commission, the National Audit Office and their own Back-Benchers tell the Government that their latest proposals will set school against school.
	We therefore oppose this model as proposed and have grave concerns about such a transfer of ownership of public assets to a trust that could be owned and controlled by groups with no local connection or accountability. But we can see advantages in groups of schools which serve whole communities becoming trusts. They could have the sort of syndicated plan referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood. That would encourage co-operation. It may improve the range of choice at 14 to 19, highlighted by my noble friend and by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, about Tomlinson and the difficulties that failure to implement fully those proposals have brought us. Community trusts could provide wider facilities for learning, leisure and out-of-school care than any single school can, and be in the interest of the whole community. They could cross the age range and would involve the local authority and other partners.
	The well-being of children in schools is paramount and is not only served by the quality of the teaching, but by the personal qualities of the teachers. It is for the sake of most decent hard-working teachers, as well as for the safety of children and the peace of mind of parents, that we need to sort out the mess that has emerged recently about how people working with children are vetted. We will debate these issues later when we have the Statement, so I shall not say much now, but I would like to place on record what we on these Benches believe about the matter, because it is relevant to any debate about schools. First, we have tried to provide a thoughtful, rather than a yah-boo response. We do not seek the scalp of Mrs Ruth Kelly. That we may leave to No. 10. Secondly, we believe we should take the opportunity as soon as possible to make a root and branch review of the systems for vetting those who are considered safe to work with children, based on the sensible proposals of Sir Michael Bichard. Thirdly, like him, we favour a single list for ease of use of employers and, crucially, training in its use for head teachers and governors—and we need more training for all who work in schools about child safeguarding issues.
	However, because of the anomalies about some people who are or have been on the current lists—in particular, the sex offenders register—we believe great care should be taken in the criteria for who should be put on the new amalgamated list. There should be no automatic read-across from all the other lists. We believe that to protect the human rights of those who wish to work with children, there should be a robust appeals system.
	We also believe that this is a matter for experts not Ministers. Ministers should set up the systems and structures and bear the responsibility for that. The criteria should be public and challengeable by Parliament. But it should be an independent panel, answerable to a Select Committee, that makes the decisions based on robust risk assessments. Perhaps it could include a member from the General Teaching Council as well as child protection experts and the police. I hope that that is the type of proposal that we will hear in your Lordships' House very soon. Only then will we be able to give parents the confidence in the system that they require, and children will be safe in their own schools.

Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold for introducing this debate, which has allowed us the opportunity to consider the future of our education system, including some key aspects of the Government's White Paper. Like the noble Lords, Lord Dearing and Lord Clarke, I feel that I have learned much from all the excellent speeches.
	In particular, I want to re-emphasise something which my noble friend said in her opening remarks and which I and my colleagues believe in passionately. In essence, you can build great school buildings, devise all kinds of structures and introduce different admissions procedures, but at the end of the day, as my noble friend Lady Shephard and other noble Lords have emphasised, what actually goes on in the classroom, the quality of leadership and teaching in a school, and, above all, the calibre of the head, are what influence the quality of a school.
	The quality of education in schools needs significant improvement. Since 1997 we have seen a raft of legislation and initiatives and strategy documents. So the question is: will genuine improvement in our education system follow this latest White Paper? Our approach to the proposals are straightforward. Wherever the Government promote rigour, encourage discipline and give schools more autonomy and parents more choice, we will support them.
	So far, this White Paper has had a tough life. The Cabinet was divided on the proposals right from the start. We understand that 5,000 copies of the first White Paper were trashed, so what we are considering is really mark 2. This helps to explain why so many commentators have felt that they were reading two documents. In many ways they are. Mark 1 was drafted by the education ministerial team with the blessing of the Prime Minister—who, incidentally, said that its contents were pivotal to the future of our education system—and mark 2 by the Deputy Prime Minister and his fellow traditionalists who still believe that government control and the dead hand of bureaucracy is best for our children's future.
	It is surprising that some of those traditionalists, including the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, are not in their places. After all, they are in Parliament today to launch a book. This debate is the opportunity for them to put their case for opposing their Government's White Paper directly to the Minister in their House. We would benefit from hearing their views.
	All the evidence shows that standards rise when schools are free to innovate, free to diversify and free to specialise. What we want to see, therefore, is a government sticking to their mission, as first drafted in mark 1, to do just that: free up our schools, give them more autonomy and parents more choice. Too many children are leaving school without basic literacy or numeracy. Over one-third of adults in the UK do not have a basic school-leaving qualification—double the proportion in Canada and Germany. As the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, said, that is a scandal. Therefore, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said, there is much, much more to be done.
	In their quest to improve the quality of education in our schools, the Government have encouraged the adoption of specialism. Schools are already allowed to select 10 per cent of their pupils by aptitude in just four of the 10 specialisms. That means that a school can select by aptitude in modern languages or music, but not by ability in maths or science. It is interesting to note that, while the Government continue to say that they are against selection, they never explain how pupils are chosen—"choose" being another word for "select"—to make up this 10 per cent on the basis of their aptitude for a specialism. Are they tested? Are they interviewed? Do they perform in front of someone? In addition, the Oxford Dictionary makes it clear that "aptitude" means,
	"natural talent, ability or fitness".
	This false distinction between aptitude and academic ability is central to the Government's whole approach to the admissions policy. It is a distinction without a difference. Trying to make sense of it was described by the Chief Schools Adjudicator as,
	"the sort of exercise lexographers get up to when they haven't enough to do".
	We must cut through this nonsense of saying that you can select according to whether you are good at sport or music but not maths or science by allowing schools to select up to 10 per cent of their pupils by whatever their aptitude or ability in whatever specialism the school has adopted. Schools must become their own admissions authorities, so that parents will be able to apply to a school direct for admission there. Schools must be able to set out their own approach to how they handle questions such as the allocation of places if they are over-subscribed and the treatment of siblings.
	The current code should be slimmed down and liberalised, although I accept that there has to be some national admissions framework within which schools operate. It should, for example, allow schools to make parents' willingness to sign a home-school contract a condition of admissions. However, the code should also make it clear that there will be no return to the 11-plus. We on these Benches remain committed to existing grammar schools, but recognise that there is no point in reopening the debate about grammar schools in parts of the country from which they have long since disappeared.
	The preoccupation with admissions policy shows what has gone wrong with the education debate in this country. It rests on the assumption that there is a fixed number of good school places to go round, and the only question is how they should be allocated—for every gainer there must be a loser. There should be more good school places in total. That is why we on these Benches are focusing on raising standards in schools across the country. As my noble friend Lord Lucas said, everyone should have the chance to go to a good school.
	Creating more good school places also requires a radical change of approach to the provision of schools. We believe that it should be easier for popular schools to expand if they wish. We want to see measures in the Government's Education Bill to give schools more freedom, rather than less. It would be disastrous for our nation's education if the Prime Minister retreated in the face of pressure from Labour traditionalists so that we ended up with no significant new freedoms for schools and, indeed, extra local authority controls over them.
	In the White Paper mark 2, we have a sense that the role of LEAs is set to remain strong, which brings me to a key question for the Minister. Is it possible for schools to have real autonomy when LEAs control their budgets? That question has already been put by my noble friend Lady Shephard, so I hope that the Minister feels able to reply. Real autonomy must mean schools controlling their own finances.
	I am also concerned that, on the "Today" programme on Radio 4 today, Jacqui Smith MP said that the Government intend to translate the White Paper into a Bill that everyone wants. Does that explain the lack of consistency in the mark 2 document?
	The Government are also sending out confusing signals over trust schools. The White Paper demonstrates that education legislation will provide trust schools with freedoms and the power to "innovate". In an answer that the Minister gave to me on the Floor of the House on 16 November, he indicated that,
	"The main legislative implication for trust schools is a new power for local authorities . . . power for local authorities in the regulation of trusts".—[Official Report, 16/11/05; col. 1071.]
	Will the Minister explain what that means? How will legislation enable local authorities to facilitate greater freedoms for trust schools?
	There must be more clarity about the role of local authorities and their powers of intervention. The recent National Audit Office report Improving Poorly Performing Schools in England illustrated that some local authorities,
	"do not prevent school decline".
	If local authorities are to be the gatekeepers to new schools and standards, will the Minister confirm that schools will not be burdened by local authority control? It is telling that the authors of the Compass report, while seeking to further empower local authorities, themselves state that some local authorities,
	"perform significantly worse than others".
	The Prime Minister has attempted to turn the education debate into a political argument about selection and academic ability. Let us make no mistake. The Government are in favour of selection on the basis of aptitude, and setting in schools is still selection but inside the school gates. There is clear evidence that setting, subject by subject, benefits all students across the ability range. However, only around 40 per cent of lessons are setted by ability. Setting must involve good education provision for all sets and it must be flexible so that pupils who improve can progress, and struggling pupils can have extra help in a good learning environment. Lower sets must be provided with high standards of education as well.
	The White Paper focuses a great deal on involving parents with a school's ethos and admissions. This is an important relationship to develop, and we welcome that. However, as we have said before in your Lordships' House, children in care who are not represented by their parents in this capacity—who may not have parents at all—must be provided with the same access to education and qualifications as the majority.
	If we are to make real progress we need honesty in this debate. That is why I am disappointed that today figures have been published that clearly show a blatant massaging of statistics. The Secretary of State has refused to release statistics on how many pupils in each school passed maths and English until after the publication of other performance data. Publication of those results is apparently due tomorrow. So the figures must be somewhere in the Secretary of State's office. Will the Minister therefore please refrain from telling us that we have just had the biggest single rise in GCSE results in a decade and give us the true picture?
	In conclusion, can we believe this week's press reports that the education legislation is to be delayed? Will the Minister indicate when the Education Bill is expected to come to this House? Our education system cannot afford for legislation to be delayed by the Prime Minister now because he wants to protect one of his Ministers. Our children are too important.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, the House is indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold, for initiating the excellent debate that we have had today. As a former Secretary of State, she spoke with great authority. I was also struck, however, by the largely consensual, constructive and long-term tone she adopted, which was sustained throughout the debate until the contributions of the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Buscombe. I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for not having come to the House wearing a black cloak and a mask. But if it is my lot in life to commission a masterpiece as great as Mozart's last composition, then there are many worse fates to which I could ultimately aspire.
	I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, and so many other speakers in this debate that the most important thing for school improvement is the quality of teaching in the classroom. I shall have a good deal more to say about this in a moment, but let me first stand back and emphasise the underlying premise on which we are all agreed—that our school system has significantly improved in recent years, but sustained further advance is required if we are to live up to our principle that every child matters.
	As so many speakers have powerfully said, as a society we simply cannot afford to have a large group of our young people left behind at school, taking huge disadvantages with them as they go out into the world of work and life thereafter. In the Britain of the future, all young people, whatever their background, need to leave school with the skills and aspirations to succeed thereafter. That objective is at the heart of government policy.
	The imperative for that is graphically demonstrated in the national school-by-school GCSE results published today, which include the measures for English and maths within the five GCSE measures reported on school by school. We would all wish to congratulate our head teachers, teachers and young people on their achievements: 56 per cent of 16 year-olds gained five or more good GCSE passes this year. That is 2.6 percentage points up on 2004; 11 percentage points up on the position in 1997; and a transformation from the position in the late 1980s, when the previous government rightly introduced the GCSE and the national curriculum to tackle a situation where only one in four school leavers reached the equivalent of today's five GCSE standard and the majority of 16 year-olds, who sat what were then called CSEs, did not even take the equivalent of today's GCSE. The position has since been transformed under reforms introduced by this and the previous government.
	Yet if we turn today's GCSE results around, they of course show that more than four in 10 16 year-olds are failing to secure the equivalent of even five good GCSEs and, as my noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton and so many others in the debate said, there is a massive social inequity in the distribution of results across our society. The figure of four in 10 failing to secure the equivalent of even five GCSEs rises to more than six in 10 among those from less advantaged backgrounds. In groups such as children in care, it is at a higher level still.
	Furthermore, alongside today's performance tables we are publishing a new measure—five or more good GCSEs including English and maths—which rightly highlights the central importance of literacy and numeracy to further education and skill training. Far from having anything to hide in this regard, it was the Government's decision to publish this data. Previously, no data were published on five GCSEs including English and maths. On this new measure, there has also this year been a 1.6 per cent improvement on the previous year, but the 56 per cent figure for success in any five GCSEs declines to 44 per cent, including English and maths. We are not disguising that figure; it is published today and we are making it clear. As the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, correctly observed, this demonstrates the extent of the challenge to ensure that basic skills are being taught effectively in our secondary schools.
	Let me also note that in no region of the country is the success rate of five GCSEs above 50 per cent—including English and maths. In the lowest performing region, the north-east, it stands at only 38 per cent. I mention that last figure as a response to those who quite wrongly claim that education policy is driven by a supposedly unrepresentative situation in London. In fact, London is now above national averages in secondary school performance. The imperative for change is nationwide, not just in London.
	As my noble friend Lady Massey and others correctly pointed out, all these problems start in primary school. The past eight years have seen a large rise in literacy and numeracy test scores; but it is still the case that one in five of 11 year-olds is not up to the standard expected of their age in literacy and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, rightly noted, 15 per cent have already started to fall seriously behind by the age of seven, as identified in the key stage 1 assessments. A child who cannot read cannot learn; the effective teaching of reading to all our young children is a constant pre-occupation of government and the teaching profession, and rightly so. In short, good progress has been made, but there is much more to do—perhaps I should say "much, much more to do"—to create good schools in every locality, and the question is how we move forward.
	From some of the comments since the publication of the schools White Paper, the House might be forgiven for thinking that the Government were no longer concentrating on school standards but rather on structural change for its own sake. This is emphatically not the case. The White Paper keeps four objectives constantly in view: first, improved teaching and leadership; secondly, improved basic skills and a curriculum tailored to the needs and talents of the individual student; thirdly, modern buildings and information technology in all schools; and, fourthly, greater school autonomy and diversity.
	Let me stress that none of these four objectives is mutually exclusive. They are mutually reinforcing. That includes the fourth element, school autonomy and diversity, which, as with the system-wide introduction of specialist schools in the secondary sector over the past 10 years, is in our policy focused resolutely on achieving higher standards. And all four are underpinned by record investment in education, with school spending per pupil now nearly twice the level of 1997, making possible, for example, a real-terms increase in experienced teachers' pay of 27 per cent nationally and 38 per cent in London, and investment in school buildings and equipment up sevenfold from £700 million a year to £5 billion a year. The noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, is absolutely right that increased funding is not in itself a silver bullet, but one does not need to spend too long in our best private schools to realise that it makes a very big difference indeed.
	Let me now address each of the four key areas I have mentioned: teaching; curriculum; infrastructure; and autonomy and diversity. I start with teaching because I say without hesitation that the single most important factor in raising standards in our schools is the quality and leadership of the teaching profession. Our mission as a government, and as a society, is to make teaching the foremost profession in the country and a career of choice for many more of our best graduates.
	In this we are making progress. There are now 33,000 more teachers than in 1997. There are also almost 90,000 extra teaching assistants, more than double the number eight years ago, who are steadily converting teaching from an almost pre-modern profession—the kind described by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing—with no support staff, into a job with the kind of back-up which every other leading profession takes for granted.
	I am glad to say—taking up the points by my noble friend Lady Morgan of Drefelin—that the biggest teacher recruitment increases have come in key priority areas. The recruitment of maths teachers is up from 1,370 five years ago to 2,610 this year; and science teacher recruitment is up from 2,420 to 3,620 in the same period, including a near doubling in the number of physics recruits. Alongside our implementation of the recommendations of the Roberts review and significant changes which are taking place in the secondary school science curriculum—taking up a point mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which will lead to a new GCSE with a great emphasis on applied and contemporary science in due course—we are seeing a significant boost to the quality of science education in our secondary schools.
	We are now recruiting above the target level in maths and science for the first time in a generation, and to boost recruitment further we recently increased the PGCE training bursary in these priority subjects from £7,000 to £9,000, alongside the "golden hello" of £5,000 payable to new maths and science teachers. I thought that my noble friend Lady Morgan of Drefelin described them as "golden haloes". That is an excellent description and I propose that we rename them forthwith. It is so important that we encourage our best graduates to go into the teaching of maths and science. Furthermore, we now have not only more teachers but also better teachers. The chief inspector has described the current generation of newly qualified teachers as "the best trained ever". I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Puttnam that we have steadily more to do in improving the quality of continuous professional development and as we do so that best-trained generation will become even better.
	I would particularly highlight two new trends in teacher recruitment which we wish to encourage further. First, a large number of career-switchers is now coming into teaching, thanks to the graduate teacher programme which represents a complete re-design of the recruiting and training system for mature entrants to the profession. These career-switchers train directly in schools and are paid a salary while training. There are now 5,000 such mature recruits a year—one in eight of all recruits to secondary teaching—and partly as a result, the average age of teacher trainees has risen to 30 for the first time.
	The second significant trend in teacher supply is the rise in applications from the leading universities, where there was little short of a collapse in recruitment during the 1980s and 1990s. Since 1998 there has been a welcome 54 per cent increase in recruitment graduates of the Russell group of leading universities. Part of the reason for this is the launch of the path-breaking Teach First programme, a wholly new scheme for attracting high flyers, offering two-year, and then renewable teaching placements for graduates in place of the traditional training and career route. Teach First is engaging a sense of challenge and duty among the best graduates, training them as a group in the summer after graduation rather than through a traditional year-long PGCE—including the daughter of one prominent Member of your Lordships' House who I saw was paraded in the Daily Mail in this regard, which means that it may or may not be true—and building a strong esprit de corps by placing the young graduates in London comprehensives in groups of between four and seven. Last year, there were nearly 1,000 applications for 200 places on Teach First, an incredible result given the traditional difficulties with recruiting into teaching in the leading universities. All of those appointed had firsts or 2:1s, and we are in the process of extending the scheme— thanks to funding from my right honourable friend the Chancellor—from London to Manchester this year and to other major cities in due course.
	However, as so many speakers have said, even more important than teachers are head teachers. We are paying, training and supporting heads better than ever before. We no longer simply expect heads to pick up the job as they go along, helped if they are very lucky by having chairs of governors of the calibre of my noble friend Lady Massey or the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp. A headship training qualification is now mandatory for all new head teachers, and the new National College for School Leadership, in Nottingham, is resolutely focused on practical school improvements. That includes, to take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, effective planning at school level to raise standards which schools are then required to follow through their school development plans and the self-assessment process that they undergo prior to Ofsted inspections.
	There has been mention of the figures last week showing a higher level than before of re-advertisement for headships. In fact, the number of vacant headships and deputy headships is low, at only 0.8 per cent, which is down sharply on the position in 1998 when the vacancy rate was 1 per cent for head teachers and 1.8 per cent for deputy head teachers. But the higher re-advertisement rate indicates that school governors and selection panels are more concerned than ever to recruit the best possible candidates and we need to assist them in doing so. Ensuring that there are indeed enough excellent head teachers is a major challenge and it leads into one theme of the White Paper—the deployment of the best head teachers to the benefit of more than just one school on a collaborative basis, which is a good example of how structural reform is being driven by a concern about standards, not about a na-ve belief in change for its own sake.
	For some years, we have been seeking to deploy our best head teachers and management teams to wider effect to spread best practice explicitly in the way my noble friend Lady Massey highlighted. For example, in the London Challenge, which has helped raise standards in so many of our lower performing London secondary schools, we use consultant head teachers in London—heads of the most successful schools in London who willingly give up a day a week to mentor heads without their experience or achievement. I met these consultant heads as a group last week. They are an outstanding group of head teachers who relish the new challenge and regard it as a great contribution that they can make to other schools in their vicinity. This has been a highly successful initiative, and taking it a stage further, there are now a number of informal federation-type arrangements, designed to make this collaboration between successful head teachers and management teams and other schools which they can help more intensive and formal than at present.
	In the case of academies, where the law allows for the complete federation between schools becoming academies, trusts formed by existing successful academies or city technology colleges have literally taken over weak or failing schools in their area, in each case, I stress, with the strong support of their local authority. For example Haberdashers' Aske's Academy in New Cross last year agreed with Lewisham council to take responsibility for Mallory School—then the lowest performing school in Lewisham—and, turned it into a second Haberdashers' Academy under the same outstanding management team, headed by Dr Liz Sidwell, which had built up the first. This is already having a transformative effect on the former Mallory School, and the Haberdashers' trust company is now looking to bring another school into its academy federation. This is precisely the kind of trust arrangement which the proposals in the recent White Paper will make possible more widely and will also make available to local authorities, which are among the keenest agencies in the business, seeking successful school leaders and management teams to help those less successful schools in their areas. Outstanding head teachers and school leaders are a scarce resource; federations and trusts are a standards-driven structural change which will enable them to have a much wider impact to the benefit of all concerned.
	I now turn to the school curriculum. This is a vast area, but let me highlight our key priorities. The first is the teaching of literacy—much mentioned in this debate. The daily literacy hour is now almost universal in our primary schools, and has greatly improved reading skills. But more needs to be done to ensure that all children become effective readers from the earliest years in primary schools, which is why last year we asked the former senior Ofsted director, Jim Rose, to report on best practice in the teaching of reading, including the use of synthetic phonic programmes. Mr Rose's report—emphasising the rigorous use of synthetic phonics in early reading programmes and also the importance of catch-up programmes—will be the basis for revisions to the national literacy strategy from this September, and also to teacher training.
	Schools also need resources and greater flexibility to build the curriculum around the needs of the individual pupil—whether those needs be, for example, for small group help with reading—mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp—writing, for gifted and talented programmes for the more able—mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe—or for vocational programmes for 15 and 16 year olds who would be better off spending time in a local college gathering more practical skills. Contrary to what the noble Baronesses, Lady Sharp and Lady Walmsley, said, the single biggest investment announcement in the schools White Paper last year was the decision to allocate for small group, catch-up and other tailored provision almost all of the general school funding available over and above that needed to meet cost pressures in the next two years—£230 million to primary schools and £335 million to secondary schools over the next two years—half of it allocated to local authorities to disperse to their schools on the basis of their number of pupils with low prior attainment. It has an especially strong deprivation focus.
	Let me say a word more about vocational education. Following the Tomlinson report—which we did not shelve: we are implementing many of its key recommendations such as the development of a wider range of opportunities and wider curriculum in secondary schools—we are now, in collaboration with employers, developing new specialised vocational diplomas. The first four diplomas, in engineering, construction, health and social care and the creative and media technologies will be available nationwide in two years' time. Inadequate vocational education has been one of the chronic historical weaknesses of our education system which we are seeking to put right, both with better vocational education in schools and colleges, and with a radical expansion of apprenticeships from which those who have gained these diplomas can then proceed. The number of apprenticeships is up from 75,000 in 1997 to 255,000 this year.
	The Government's third over-riding priority is the modernisation of the school infrastructure—buildings, equipment and information technology. The £5 billion in annual capital funding that I mentioned earlier is making possible the building schools for the future programme rightly highlighted by my noble friend Lord Clarke, which is rebuilding or renewing the entire secondary school estate and half of primary schools over the next 15 years, providing not only better classrooms, including better science teaching facilities but also better facilities for sport, special educational needs, the arts, the provision of meals, childcare, and adult community education too, making it possible for schools to become community facilities open 12 hours a day all year including school holidays in order to deliver on the vision in the White Paper of what are described as "extended schools" offering these facilities in all communities all year round.
	I turn briefly to the issue of school autonomy and diversity. It is important to understand that the concept of the trust school—a school whose governors take extra responsibility for management, which may include a suitable external partner with a commitment to educational excellence—builds on traditions and successful models which run deep in the state education system and nowhere deeper than in the faith schools and church schools highlighted by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford in his speech.
	Let me demonstrate this with precise figures. There are 4,006 state secondary schools in England: 2,380 of them are now specialist schools, many of them with highly productive partnerships with external sponsors. Five hundred and seventeen secondary schools also have foundation status, which means that they own their own buildings, employ their own staff directly and are responsible for administering their admissions within the rules of the code of practice. Additional to the 517 foundation schools, there are 712 voluntary schools or academies, in which one of the faith communities or a non-faith external partner plays a key role in the governance of the school, as well as the school having responsibility for assets and staffing.
	Those are essential parts of our existing state education system. The principles involved in trust schools are deeply embedded within the state education system and are exemplified in many of the most successful state schools today. The issue at stake in the debate that we are now having is whether we are prepared to make them available more widely to state schools, where schools and local authorities believe they will improve the quality of education. Our belief, on the basis of a piloting of faith schools that goes back to the foundation of the National Society 195 years ago, is that that there is a good basis for thinking that this policy is well founded.
	I had a whole section on admissions, which I think will preoccupy the House a good deal in the future, so I will save that until our next debate. I emphasise that the code of practice and our rules on admission are very robust. We attach the highest possible importance to seeing that they are sustained and maintained in schools that adopt trust status.
	My time is up. I am deeply grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. I will reflect further on what has been said and, where necessary, follow it up in writing. In conclusion, perhaps I may quote the words of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools in his most recent annual report. He said:
	"We have moved from a system that educated a few superbly and the rest indifferently to one that is attempting to educate everyone very well".
	That is our mission—an education system attempting to educate everyone very well. Upon it our future success as a nation depends, and it is a privilege to be engaged with so many others in this House on such an important task.

Baroness Shephard of Northwold: My Lords, I echo the words of the noble Lord in saying that this has been an excellent debate, as one would have expected from the knowledge, expertise and commitment of those taking part. Obviously I do not have the time, nor would I subject the House to a point by point mention of the contributions made by noble Lords, but there has been surprising consensus.
	We have had mention of professional development, not least from the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam; diversity from the right reverend Prelate; the importance of science from my noble friends Lord Lucas and Lady Morgan of Drefelin; practical suggestions for piloting from the noble Lord, Lord Dearing; for the production of a plan from the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland—many schools would feel that they do produce a plan, but perhaps not on the scale envisaged by the noble Lord—and, of course, the very interesting practical suggestion of concentrating on very small schools from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton. That is a simple idea but one that obviously works in the example she chose.
	We have heard of the vital importance for good education especially in deprived areas from the noble Baronesses, Lady Sharp, Lady Massey and Lady Walmsley, and the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, and there was warm support from my noble friend Lady Buscombe for the principles in the White Paper.
	The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has, with his customary commitment and fairness, admitted that there is much more to do but has given a justified picture of many of the efforts the Government are making. Many questions on the detail of the White Paper remain, but of course we will have our moment.
	Finally, I think that there really is consensus today on the important and crucial role played by heads and teachers in getting education to reach all our communities and all our children. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Safeguarding Children

Lord Adonis: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Skills on safeguarding vulnerable groups. The Statement is as follows:
	"Mr Speaker, I am grateful for this opportunity to make a further Statement about arrangements for vetting those working with children and barring those who are unsuitable. In addition, I am placing in the Library copies of the review of List 99 that I announced last week, which gives further background on the Statement I am making today.
	"Nothing matters to parents more than the safety of their children. So I deeply regret the worry and concern that have been caused to parents over the past few days. I am determined to do everything I can to ease their concerns.
	"This is a complex area. There are no easy answers. Child protection has been a top priority of successive governments. Ministers in this and previous administrations have made difficult decisions, particularly in maintaining the safety of children while protecting those working in schools from malicious allegations.
	"The operation of the list is set out in legislation going back to 1926, but attitudes have changed significantly in recent decades. This has led to a greater concentration on the terrible effects of child abuse. Consequently, law and practice have been continually tightened.
	"I pay tribute to the party opposite for paving the way for the sex offenders register and for beginning the process of automatically barring teachers convicted of sex offences. This Government have gone further still. From the year 2000 those included on List 99 on the grounds of unsuitability to work with children have received a full bar. All sex offenders placed on List 99 are banned from schools indefinitely. And in 2003 we passed the most comprehensive overhaul of sex offences legislation since the 1950s. We introduced the Criminal Records Bureau in 2002 to ensure that all schools have full access to the convictions and cautions of the schools workforce. Sir Michael Bichard's report, following the events in Soham, made 31 further recommendations, 13 of which are already in place with the remainder being implemented.
	"But there is more to be done. Our vetting and barring system, which is a shared responsibility between government, local agencies and employers, has developed piecemeal over the past 80 years. In addition, rightly, the public mood on these issues has hardened.
	"It is time therefore to overhaul the system. We need a system where child protection comes first—above all other considerations. It must be a rigorous system drawing on the best expert advice. There must be absolute clarity about who does what. The system must command public confidence and it must be accountable. And it must be fair to individuals, giving rights of appeal. There must be no witch-hunts against hard-working teachers and there must be protection against false or malicious allegations. Today, I am setting out how we will achieve that.
	"Public concern has focused on the operation of List 99. I understand that concern, but ensuring List 99 works properly is only one key part of the current vetting system. The most important check against a school unknowingly employing someone with a sex offence is the check employers do through the Criminal Records Bureau. These show the full record of potential employees, including convictions and cautions and whether the applicant is on List 99 or other centrally held databases. Criminal records checks allow schools and others to make informed decisions about whether to appoint. List 99 provides a further check, including the most serious cases. For someone who is on the list, because they are unsuitable to work for children, it is a criminal offence for them to apply to work in school.
	"List 99 contains 4,045 names. The vast majority are barred indefinitely from working in schools. A much smaller subset—210—are subject to restrictions short of a full ban. List 99 goes wider than just sexual offenders and covers those convicted of crimes such as deception as well as those who are unsuitable on health grounds. But because List 99 has only ever automatically covered those individuals who are already working in the education sector when they commit an offence, the Criminal Records Bureau, which covers everyone, is the main safety net.
	"For convictions for 40 of the most serious offences, inclusion on the list is automatic. For other cases the decisions have been at Ministers' discretion, the vast majority always taken by officials on Ministers' behalf. In these discretionary cases, advice may be sought from a wide variety of relevant sources before a decision is taken—for example, the police, experts in sexual offences and forensic psychiatrists.
	"In 2005, 2,554 cases were referred to the department, of which 513 resulted in a full bar. In many cases, where an individual is not barred, the evidence considered will have been based on suspicions and allegations rather than firm criminal cautions or convictions, or the individuals referred will have been nothing to do with education. A preliminary comparison of these numbers with historic data from 1985 and 1995 suggests that the number of decisions reached each year has increased substantially. Yet, in all three years, both Ministers and officials have made a wide variety of decisions on individuals with convictions, cautions and subject to allegations which have been referred for a wide variety of reasons, including sexual offences. As I say, these issues are complex, always have been and successive Ministers have been required to make the most difficult decisions.
	"Understandably, recent concerns have focused on discretionary decisions by Ministers not to include an individual on List 99, despite that individual being on the sex offenders register. The review that I set in place has identified 10 cases since 1997. In each case, the recommendations, after expert evidence, were that these individuals posed no threat to children. As a result, these individuals were issued with a grave warning with the requirement for disclosure if they applied for a job in a school. I can, however, tell the House that officials and the police have examined each case.
	"Current enquires suggest that none of the individuals concerned is working in a school. I have also asked police to visit each of these individuals to check whether there is any cause for concern. None is judged by the police to pose a current risk. However, over the past 10 days I have been determined to go further to provide a more complete analysis. I have asked officials to look at the similar decisions by officials; and decisions by Ministers and officials on cases since 1997, where the relevant offences were committed prior to the sex offenders register. That has identified a further 46 cases. As many of these cases deal with very old offences and are not monitored under sex offender monitoring arrangements, our information is much more limited. Officials, and where relevant the police, have found the following:
	"For 32 of the 46 cases, there is no evidence that the individuals are working with children. In one case, an individual is working in education but has been assessed by the police as of no cause for concern. In 13 cases, preliminary checks have shown no reason for concern, but our information is as yet not complete. In two of those cases, inconsistent data need to be reconciled. Further action on all 13 cases will be considered in conjunction with the police on a case-by-case basis."
	"I am sure that the House will want me to thank the police for their work in following up individuals as part of this exercise. In addition, the police have carried out an initial review to see if there were any further individuals being monitored on the sex offenders register who might be eligible for List 99. Initial investigations suggest there may be 32 such cases in England and Wales. As a precaution, the police have assessed all these cases. In one case, investigations are continuing.
	"I fully accept that this review of individual cases has identified wider issues about how the vetting system currently operates. Building on Sir Michael Bichard's inquiry, I have identified three key issues that we now need to address. The first is the lack of coherence between List 99 and the other lists held nationally. That is made worse by problems in sharing information and by the fact that, historically, cautions have been treated differently from convictions despite both being a legal statement of guilt. The second is the lack of clarity about who is responsible for doing what, locally and nationally. The third is ministerial involvement in decisions.
	"I have concluded that further reform is necessary. Some of it can be done immediately and some through the primary legislation that we have already planned. Over the past 10 days, I have considered whether it would be possible more closely to align the sex offenders register and List 99. I have decided that we need to go further than that. After extensive consideration, I have decided that the most effective approach is to bar from working with children all those who are now convicted or cautioned for any sexual offences against children, whether the individual is on the sex offenders register or not. I will shortly bring forward regulations automatically to enter on List 99 anyone who is convicted or cautioned for a sexual offence against a child. I will also automatically bar individuals for a range of other serious sexual offences against adults. By including cautions as well as convictions, the anomaly between offenders who are convicted and those who admit their guilt and accept a caution will end. Individuals will have the right to make representations, but they will need to prove that they are not a threat to children before they can work in a school or other education establishment. I shall consult widely on the detailed implementation of this measure.
	"Secondly, I will require mandatory Criminal Records Bureau checks for all newly appointed school employees, replacing the current guidance. That will also require that teaching agencies ensure that their teachers have a Criminal Records Bureau check. That should ensure that all employers make judgments about appointments in full knowledge of the facts, whether or not a potential employer has previously worked in the education sector.
	"Thirdly, Ofsted will carry out an urgent survey of existing vetting practice in a sample of schools to report to me in the spring. Fourthly, I will be writing today to all schools setting out how the checking system will work and informing them of the change to mandatory CRB checks. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary is writing today to all chief constables, chief officers of probation and the Youth Justice Board to restate how the current system works; how it is changing; and the priority attached to this area.
	"Fifthly, I will ensure that all DfES staff who are part of the vetting process receive appropriate training, support and advice in child protection issues. Finally, in advance of legislating to remove Ministers from the process entirely, I will establish a panel of independent experts, chaired by Sir Roger Singleton, the former head of Barnado's, to oversee the whole List 99 process. His role will be to ensure the quality of the process and advise me on any further List 99 cases that need to be decided. The panel will draw on expertise from the police and child protection specialists. While I will not fetter my discretion on individual cases, I cannot presently envisage the circumstances in which I would not follow its expert advice.
	"The expert panel will also review cases determined before 1997. The panel will examine cases which, had the sex offenders register existed, would have resulted in the individual's inclusion on the register and all cases involving a sexual offence or allegation which resulted in a decision not to include on List 99 or in a restriction or partial bar. The aim of this review will be to establish whether any individual poses a risk of harm to children and if any action should be taken. The Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education and Skills will ensure that the relevant former Minister is consulted in any such case.
	"These reforms will make the current List 99 system work better immediately. But the whole Government are determined to replace List 99 entirely with a new, better system as quickly as possible. As my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said in his Statement today, good progress is being made in implementing the recommendations of the Bichard inquiry. The necessary legislation, promised in the Queen's speech, will be brought forward in February. In particular, this legislation will bring together List 99 and the Protection of Children Act list into a single register of those barred from working with children.
	"I will also use this legislation to make further reforms. I will legislate to give independent experts the final decision on who should be barred. This will have the effect of removing from Ministers the responsibility for taking barring decisions. Decision making will be transferred to a statutory body, which will be the holder of the new combined register and will take all decisions about who should be barred. Individuals will retain the right to appeal. While I will consult about the exact role of the body, I will ensure that police advice will inform every decision.
	"Over the years, procedures have been strengthened. It is time, however, to strengthen them further. Nobody who is convicted or cautioned for child sex offences should be allowed to teach in schools. We need an independent panel to take decisions. And we must do all this with proper safeguards to ensure that no teacher subject to claims or allegations that may be strongly contested should be unfairly condemned. Our task as a Government, my task as Secretary of State and all our tasks as legislators is to get this framework right. That is what the reforms that I have announced today will do".
	My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. Parents and teachers will be relieved to hear the Statement today. After nearly a fortnight in which teachers and parents have become increasingly worried and confused about sex offenders in schools, at last we have some basic information. We welcome that. We also welcome the commitment that no one convicted or cautioned should be allowed to teach. Even after Soham and the Bichard report, Ministers still made decisions that broke that principle. Why has it taken so long to get any information from the Secretary of State? Ministers were personally deciding whether sex offenders should work in schools. The Secretary of State has rightly stressed today how difficult those decisions were, but surely the department would have to keep track of the sex offenders that it was releasing into our schools. Instead, the department has been incapable of answering basic questions about those sex offenders for a whole fortnight.
	Even if the Secretary of State did not decide on individual cases, surely it was her responsibility to make sure that they were properly monitored. Instead, parents have been shocked that Ministers have been so ignorant of decisions that they themselves have taken. It is that complete absence of reliable information over the past fortnight which has created the frenzy of speculation. Ministers must understand how much damage the uncertainty of the past fortnight has done to parents' confidence in the department and to the integrity of the people working in our schools.
	There are still uncertainties. Today's Statement indicates that a life ban will be imposed on those convicted and cautioned. Will the Minister tell us whether this will apply to those who had convictions or cautions prior to the sex offenders register? The Secretary of State states that the principle should be that no sex offenders should be placed in schools. However, in figures given to the House, it appears that in 88 cases Ministers have breached this principle. What plans does the Minister have for the 13 individuals where there is insufficient information to determine whether there is a concern?
	Many key questions have been put to the Minister's department on behalf of parents and teachers to which we still do not have answers. Why is it possible to work in a school without even completing a criminal records check? Why did a previous Secretary of State specifically recommend schools to continue recruiting people before these checks had been completed? Were head teachers and governing bodies informed if Ministers decided that a sex offender should be permitted to work in their school? Why did the Secretary of State tell the House last week that offenders were automatically put on List 99 which bars them for life from teaching, when we know that that is not the case?
	In repeating the Statement, the Minister stated that there must be absolute clarity. We entirely agree with that. In implementing the details of new measures, there must be no oversight. The Secretary of State has also failed to explain some grotesque decisions that Ministers have taken in the past five years. The whole system needs a complete overhaul. We will work constructively with the Government to achieve that.
	I turn to the Government's proposals. The Secretary of State has said that she will finally implement the recommendations made in the Bichard report of 2004. Let us go back five years to the Protection of Children Act 1999. The Explanatory Notes of that Act state that its purpose is to create:
	"the framework of a coherent cross-sector system for identifying people unsuitable to work with children and achieving a 'one stop shop' to compel or allow employers to access a single point for checking the names of people they propose to employ in a post involving the care of children. This will involve . . . checks against criminal records and two lists . . . maintained respectively by the Department of Health and the Department for Education".
	Why have Ministers not implemented those measures so that they passed into law six years ago? The Bichard report exposed an inadequate system of child protection. The ultimate responsibility for this rests with Ministers.
	I believe that the Secretary of State is honourable and honest. The question for Ministers and for the Prime Minister is whether they are capable of regaining the confidence of parents and teachers after such a difficult fortnight. I hope that the Government will take stock and will put the interests of parents, teachers and the integrity of our school system first.

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for repeating the Statement and acknowledge the work that he, his colleagues, the police and DfES officials have done in the past few days to complete this vital review. The Secretary of State appears to have gone a long way today towards achieving what everyone wants; that is, the restoration of parents' confidence in the system of child protection. However, I hope that the Minister will acknowledge that it will take more than one statement to complete that process.
	I am pleased to say that the Statement contains much of what I called for in the previous debate. I particularly welcome the proposals for a single list for people working with children in order to end confusion for employers and dangerous inconsistencies and loopholes; the removal from Ministers the responsibility for individual case review and the establishment of an expert panel to start work immediately; new guidance and training for schools on appointment procedures; and the intention to protect teachers from malicious allegations.
	The Minister emphasised the importance of CRB checks, but will he explain why the latest guidance issued by his department in June 2005 did not require schools to receive an enhanced Criminal Records Bureau disclosure before appointing a teacher? Surely the NSPCC is right to argue for such a disclosure before anyone can work unsupervised with children. What can he say to reassure parents and schools that the CRB can perform an increased number of disclosures more quickly in the light of the delays that we have heard about?
	I support the proposed central barring unit, with experts reviewing individual cases. Will the Minister confirm that the criteria and guidelines that the units use will be published? How will Parliament be able to participate in their establishment? Can he confirm that the plans will ensure that certain categories of work with children, currently exempt from CRB checks, will now be covered? Will it include all schools, including academies and those in the private sector? Why were people minding children over eight years old ever exempted from these checks? Does the Minister also accept that parts of the package today urgently need more work? Does he share my concern that some agencies which supply staff to schools appear to be particularly poor at checking references and records, even if they are to be obliged to do so? What will the Minister do about that?
	When people from overseas apply to teach in our schools, is the Minister convinced that the plans provide for sufficient checks? Is he really satisfied that the CRB should have no statutory role in regard to overseas staff working with children and that employers must rely on faxback services available from a small number of countries? Given the increasing reliance of some public services on staff from abroad, why are the Government not going much further on that, working within the EU and the Commonwealth? What did the UK presidency, for example, do on that?
	Will the Minister reassure the House that in this vital drive to protect children we also remember to protect teachers when false allegations are made? Will he ensure that new guidance and training reminds schools of the need for safeguards for teachers who may be wrongly accused? How will he ensure that teacher recruitment does not suffer from all this? Does the Minister now accept that this situation has largely arisen due to delays in implementing the recommendations of the Bichard inquiry? Can the Minister tell the House what the Prime Minister failed to tell another place yesterday: how soon will the 18 unimplemented Bichard recommendations be implemented? How many of those are the responsibility of the DfES? How many fall to the Home Office? Given the Home Office delays with computer projects for Bichard, can the Minister reassure the House on the timing of the IT proposals set out today and the safeguards that there will be in the interim?
	I should like to ask a serious question about a particularly important sentence on page 5 of the Statement. It reads:
	"After extensive consideration I have decided the most effective approach is to bar from working with children all those who are now convicted or cautioned for any sexual offences against children whether the individual is on the sex offenders register or not".
	Is that about the past or just about the future? This is a genuine question of clarification. Does this mean that gay men who were on the sexual offenders register for offences that are no longer offences will be barred from working with children? I refer, of course, to the equalisation of the age of consent legislation, which has left some anomalies. Does it also mean that an 18 year-old male who has consensual sex with his 15 year-old girlfriend would be barred from choosing the teaching profession? These cases may have serious human rights issues.
	It is in the interests of children, parents, our schools and the whole community that confidence is restored rapidly and the hysteria is ended. I believe that the Secretary of State and the Minister have made a really good start. If they deliver on their promises and answer our reasonable questions, Liberal Democrats will work with them to complete that task.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Buscombe and Lady Walmsley, for the broadly supportive tone of their responses to the Statement and for their support of the Government in bringing forward legislation to implement the Bichard recommendations this month. We look forward to their continuing support when the legislation is presented so that it can be enacted as swiftly as possible.
	I cannot stress sufficiently strongly that there has been no delay in proceeding with the Bichard recommendations. Last week I gave the House details of the post-Bichard vetting scheme action plan, published before the general election. It was agreed with Sir Michael Bichard in detail, including timescales on the way forward. We are delivering on our commitments in that plan, and those include the timescales involved. As the report itself states in terms, the plan agreed with Sir Michael meets all the material requirements of his recommendations and Sir Michael himself is happy to endorse it. As he said last week when asked about our actions in response to his report, he has been very impressed with the work of the DfES. I hope that we can move away from a dispute over what was or was not said by Sir Michael and now get on with the process of implementing his report, on which we are all agreed.
	The point made in the Statement which links directly to a question put by both noble Baronesses is how important it is that employers should not only have regard to List 99, which is a ban on individuals working in schools, but also that they should themselves complete effective checks on the status of individuals to whom they are minded to offer jobs. Those include CRB checks. We think it is very important that CRB checks should be completed in a timely fashion. My figures show that currently the CRB processes 99.4 per cent of applications for standard disclosures—cautions, convictions, reprimands or warnings—within 28 days, while 85.5 per cent of applications for enhanced disclosure—including details of all information available to the public authorities—are also being processed within 28 days. I believe that provides the kind of security head teachers and school governors need when proceeding with making appointments subject to the requirement we are now imposing: that they must seek a CRB check. In virtually all cases it will be possible to complete the check before a formal job offer is made and employment is taken up. It is important to stress that to schools so that they do not fear that they will be facing a major new problem in response to these decisions. While we do not require the CRB check to be completed by the time an individual takes up their employment, in virtually all cases it will be. Where that is not the case, a whole set of requirements is placed on schools covering how they should behave, including ensuring proper supervision.
	We have given a good deal of advice to schools following the publication of the Bichard report on how they should undertake vetting and how to widen the interview process so as to root out those individuals who are not suitable to work in schools. Substantial safer recruitment materials are now available online in addition to the formal guidance issued by the department. I have a copy of the online material with me. It is set out clearly and is helpful to schools because it emphasises the need for continued monitoring. That has been done because many people who become unsuitable to work with children would not have exhibited those characteristics or have a record from which it could have been ascertained at the time of their appointment. The need for schools to maintain a culture of awareness, openness and vigilance is stressed, in addition to good recruitment and induction practices as a vital contribution to safeguarding pupils and supporting their staff.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, asked about the 13 cases where we do not yet have complete information. I am advised that the police are actively engaged in examining these cases. We will consider any further action in the light of their findings. However, it is not the case that those 13 cases have been put to one side. The police are continuing with their investigations in that regard.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, asked about the position of independent schools. I understand that the requirements placed on independent schools are even more stringent than those for state schools in terms of completing CRB checks in respect of their staff. We are aligning the current statutory regime that applies both to independent and state schools.
	The bar on working for all those who are convicted or cautioned will be for the future but, as indicated in the Statement, the expert panel will look at all past cases to see whether there are concerns which should be addressed. Of course where there are questions or concerns, the panel will urgently draw those cases to the attention of the police and the employer.
	I believe I have answered most of the questions that were put to me and I shall follow up any others in writing, in particular the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, about teachers from overseas. We are indeed seeking to enhance action in that area. In conclusion, I say that it is absolutely essential that schools have confidence in the system for vetting and authorising those seeking to teach. We believe that the system is robust and that the further changes made this afternoon by my right honourable friend, including the rapid introduction of a single register and an independent panel, will increase public confidence. Schools can proceed safely on that basis.

Lord Biffen: My Lords, my noble friend Lady Buscombe has referred to the Secretary of State for Education and Skills as being "honest and honourable". I am sure that that will be endorsed by the entire Chamber. Does not that constructive response contrast with the way certain elements of the media have handled this whole business over the past 10 days? It says little about the historic role the media are supposed to perform.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord and I agree entirely with the point he makes. The media have great public responsibilities in this area. They must ensure that people are not alarmed unnecessarily, but of course they have a duty to report cases where they believe that there are concerns. I hope that the Statement made today by my right honourable friend will enable a much more informed debate to take place in the media and that it will percolate down rapidly to schools themselves.

Lord Taverne: My Lords, following on the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Biffen, of course there have to be safeguards and I welcome these measures, which are obviously sensible. However, does not the Minister agree that there has been an element of hysteria about the risks posed by paedophiles? Hysteria is illiberal because it endangers human rights, such as the rights of some teachers; it is dangerous because it stirs up in some elements of society an atmosphere of lynch law; and it has enormously exaggerated the problem. Paedophilia is not one of the greatest problems of our time, as recent media comments appear to suggest. In fact, the risk from paedophiles is much less than that faced by children in crossing the road, but its effect may well be that children are restrained from taking part in activities that are healthy and desirable. Does not the Minister agree that it is time we regained a certain sense of perspective on this issue?

Lord Adonis: My Lords, our overriding duty as a government is to ensure that the systems in place for preventing the employment of unsuitable people, particularly those convicted of sexual offences, or those who have a record meaning they are unsuited to working with children, are robust. We have public duties in this matter and I believe that we have fulfilled them in the way the public would expect, that the measures my right honourable friend set out today will enhance public confidence, and that the hysteria to which the noble Lord refers does not continue to take hold of debate in the media.

Baroness Uddin: My Lords, I welcome the Statement repeated by my noble friend, the review and the overhaul of the lists announced by the Secretary of State. I also want to echo the mood of the House: I think it is absolutely right that the Secretary of State took the time to pay detailed attention to this matter prior to the announcement. It would have been hysterical to approach it any earlier.
	As someone who has been involved in child protection for a good 20 years, I very much welcome some of the publicity, but does the Minister accept that some of this publicity may not have filtered down to many sections of the community? I would very much like to hear what he suggests we do to ensure that the impact of List 99, or the changes that are perhaps afoot in the very near future, are announced as widely as possible, to ensure particularly that it covers not only the private education sector, but some after-school activities. I am talking, in particular, about religious institutions that run clubs and so on. I am also particularly concerned about sporting facilities where schools often use ad hoc teachers. How will they be covered?
	Finally, will my noble friend Lord Adonis assure the House that not even one paedophile is allowed to taint a child's life? One paedophile is too many.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, as I said in the Statement, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State is writing to all local authorities today, setting up arrangements that will apply from now onwards and will enable local authorities to put in place immediately any changes needed to their own practices. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary is writing to all police authorities today, too. I hope that will enable a quite rapid dissemination of the elements of these new arrangements to all local authorities and for any improvements that are needed to take place pretty well immediately.
	I want to comment on the point made by noble friend about the importance of measured judgments in this matter. When the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, repeated the remarks of her colleagues in the other place, I thought she asked why it had taken so long for this information to be made available to the House. We have spent 10 days trawling through 4,000 or more files of all cases, concerning not only those where Ministers took a decision but those where any official took a decision, or where there was any other factor to do with police information or anything that might be ascertained by going through the relevant information. I do not believe that, given the scale of the task at hand, 10 days was an excessive period. I believe that we would have been criticised in Parliament if we had done this job more hastily and come back with a less complete picture.

Reserve Armed Forces

Earl Attlee: rose to call attention to the Reserve Armed Forces of the Crown; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, all my adult life I have been a member of the Territorial Army, by far the largest of our volunteer Reserve Forces. I will concentrate my remarks on the TA, but most of them will be equally applicable to other volunteer and regular Reserve Forces. I apologise for concentrating on the TA. I served the first 18 years in the ranks, was then commissioned in 1991 and am still serving. I therefore feel extremely honoured to introduce this subject for debate this afternoon.
	Prior to 1995 there were many, inside and outside the regular Armed Forces, who questioned whether volunteer reservists could be competent in their role and, in particular, whether they would be willing and able to respond to a call-out. These anxieties were most evident after the end of the Cold War. For nearly all my service as a soldier we were training to engage in World War III on the north German plain. Those of us who took a realistic view did not expect much notice of mobilisation. We did expect to operate, at least as a sub-unit, with all our comrades, but I certainly never expected to come back from it. I would like to take this opportunity to thank sincerely the noble and gallant Lords and Ministers who prosecuted that Cold War so skilfully that we never needed to fight it.
	An obvious weakness of any volunteer Reserve Force is that it cannot be as well trained, particularly in terms of breadth, as its regular counterpart, due to limitations on the time and funding available. Prior to 1995 many without direct experience of the volunteer reserves were somewhat dismissive. Phrases such as "Dad's Army" and "SAS" were used—not unlike the attitude of senior Members of another place before they come to your Lordships' House. Those with direct experience understood the weaknesses and how to mitigate them, but they also had a much better understanding of volunteers' strengths: enthusiasm, commitment, wider experience, knowledge and skills. Volunteers learn to give and take orders and communicate militarily. Volunteers are not generally trained to operate a wide range of equipment but they understand intimately that which they do operate. Thus when I was a soldier I was hands-on with my specialist vehicle on average at least one day a week over several years. Few regulars would be able to match that.
	In 1995, after the first widespread use of the TA for IFOR, when the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, was CDS, the whole situation changed because the TA did what it said on the tin. A large number volunteered for that operation. Of course there were problems, particularly in administration, but they have now been largely overcome. A key element has been the Reserve Training and Mobilisation Centre at Chilwell. There is a now a very good relationship and respect between the regulars and volunteers. Since 1995, it has been usual for 10 per cent of a deployed land force to be TA.
	After Op TELIC, the TA became the reserve of first choice. Understandably, ex-regular soldiers do not take their reserve liability very seriously. For Op TELIC 1, it was necessary to call up about 10 regular reservists to have one mobilised; if the address proved correct the rate was one in six. However, in REME TA, my regiment, the success rate was one in 1.17 and it was similar in the rest of the TA. It should be remembered that that was for a campaign with limited public support. I understand that the planning assumption now is for a ratio of 1.25 to 1, which sounds prudent.
	So that is where we are. It is a good story. We have volunteer Reserve Forces that work and would have worked at any time after the major reorganisation of the 1960s. However, there are some serious problems that cannot be ignored. I think that some in the staff thought that volunteers could be used compulsorily to sustain enduring operations. That is a mistake; volunteers should be seen as an insurance policy against the unforeseeable and to enable infrequent large-scale operations—that is to say, more than one full brigade—to be undertaken. If our regular forces could undertake a large-scale operation on their own, without reinforcement from the TA, they would probably be too well endowed.
	It is, of course, highly desirable for volunteers to be able to engage in operations when it is convenient to them and they can be used—it is useful to them when they have a career break. A formal pairing arrangement between regular units and TA units would be beneficial. We are now in a situation where nearly everyone in the TA who could be of use to current operations has already been called up. There is a legal gap between compulsory mobilisations of three years and a practical one of five. I am extremely anxious that we might mobilise volunteer reservists who have completed their recruit and trade training and are technically fit for role but do not have sufficient training and experience to be deployed. The consequences of doing that could be very serious.
	The SDR imposed significant cuts in the strength of the TA. The actual strength has fallen by 20,000 since 1998. It is interesting that the age limit for officers has been extended from 55 to 60. I sometimes wonder whether I will be retiring from the House of Lords before I can retire from the TA. I doubt that all under-strength units are vigorously cutting out their non-attending dead wood. In my experience, the most effective TA soldiers train for about 50 days per year. They attend unit annual camp and a trade or specialist course. However, from time to time, man training days are severely restricted. That causes morale problems, low standards and poor retention and encourages bounty-hunters who do the absolute minimum. There are not many bounty-hunters but it is still a depressing problem. Volunteers cannot be expected to be more usable and more relevant, as per SDR, if they are not allocated plenty of MTDs.
	It is not just the amount of training undertaken, it is the quality. Overseas training exercises are vital for a variety of obvious reasons. This is recognised, but due to operational commitments it is difficult to arrange RAF air-trooping to the exercise location. This must be addressed at ministerial level.
	A volunteer's ability to go on operations and to train is limited by their family and their job. Many leave after a few years because of family commitments, but a bigger problem is the relationship with their employer. My noble friends Lord Glenarthur—chairman of the National Employer Advisory Board for British reserves—and Lord Freeman—president of the council of the Reserved Forces and Cadets Associations—will talk about the work of their organisations, so I will not steal their thunder. However, there are some post-demobilisation problems. It appears that the volunteer is on his own if he needs to fight to get his job back. My understanding is that there are generally no MoD observers at the reinstatement hearings of employment tribunals. I know of one case where the reservist is £3,000 out of pocket for legal fees, and had inadequate support from the MoD. In short, he was on his own. That cannot be right, but care needs to be taken to handle these cases sensitively or employer support could rapidly evaporate. I cannot help thinking that a woman returning from maternity leave would enjoy better employment protection than a reservist returning from serving Queen and country.
	Many reservists have civilian skills of great potential use in an operation, but their reservist military role is quite different. Usually a volunteer will join their nearest unit rather than the one that matches their civilian skills. There is no database of reservists' civilian skills, only of their military qualifications. This is a significant missed opportunity and should be rectified.
	A serious and imminent problem is medical support to operations, particularly when Afghanistan is scaled up. The TA field hospitals did a fabulous job on Op TELIC, but not without friction. The difficulty is that the NHS is stretched and has its own problems, but the defence medical services do too. There is a difficult balance to be struck. Medical support is an obvious role for the TA because it is not sensible to have regular clinical staff underutilised in peacetime locations. The current problem is that demand for medical services on deployed operations is unusually high, and I hope it will, at some time, reduce. What can the Minister say about medical support for operations later this year?
	Noble Lords will be aware of the serious problems with recruitment and retention. Much of this is due to the general public view of current operations in Iraq and the questionable legality and necessity of the war in 2003. The picture that I am getting from the ground is mixed. The situation is recovering from 2004. In some places it is a retention problem, in others it is a recruitment problem, and in some places it is both. On retention, there has always been around 30 per cent annual turnover in the TA. It sounds alarming, but is not entirely negative. Even a year or two in the TA would be beneficial to the soldier, and would increase the knowledge of the military in wider society. The problem is if we are losing too many experienced NCOs, and the statistics may not readily reveal this. What is the situation, and what is being done to improve it? Many of these problems about the TA on operations would be less likely if the TA deployed as formed units, no matter how small. Pairing would also help.
	There is a campaign to secure pension rights in respect of past volunteer reserve service. I will not weary your Lordships with the arguments—I do not support them, and on a practicality front it would be extremely expensive to administer really quite small benefits. On the other hand, to encourage volunteers to have a full TA career of at least 12 years, could we not consider some form of attractive pension that would start clocking up at the 12-year point?
	My final substantive point concerns junior officers. For many years it has become increasingly difficult to recruit and retain direct entry junior officers. Modern patterns of employment with lean working cause problems for soldiers but they are greatly magnified for officers, who tend to hold more demanding civilian jobs. Despite the good work done by those responsible, including my noble friends, many employers still seem to be ignorant of what they are missing in terms of quality and free training. I am not aware of any junior officers being mobilised for Operation TELIC 1, although there are good reasons for that. Therefore, post-Operation TELIC, it seems to me unlikely that junior officers would ever command on operations the troops that they recruited and trained. This is because the TA is being used mainly as individual reinforcements rather than formed units, however small. This would tend to make it even less attractive to attempt the rather elongated officer training package. I spent the first 18 years as a soldier and I had fabulous fun. I did not bother about a commission until much later. When I was in command I always had it in mind that I might have to take my company on operations and at short notice. Therefore, I strove to make it fit for operations.
	Returning to the problem, it is possible to commission suitable senior NCOs and warrant officers. They do a good job with high attendance but are no substitute for direct entry officers. Unfortunately, I do not think that there is an obvious easy answer to that problem.
	Finally, I thank all the regular permanent staff instructors who over many years have given me and my comrades in the volunteer Reserve Forces such good training and military ethos. I also pay tribute to all active reservists for their citizenship, sense of duty and the sacrifices that they have made. I beg to move for Papers.

Lord Truscott: My Lords, I declare an interest as an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. I begin by welcoming this debate and commending the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for bringing it before your Lordships' House. I know that, as a Major in the Territorial Army in Iraq during Operation TELIC, the noble Earl served with great courage and distinction.
	As we have already heard, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, speaks with a great deal of personal experience and knowledge on the subject of Her Majesty's Reserve Armed Forces. I am sure that when my noble friend the Minister winds up the debate, he will give due weight to the noble Earl's views and concerns.
	It is true that in recent years there has been a major strategic evolution in the way we use the reserves. The Ministry of Defence has moved from a large and little-used reserve to a smaller, more effective one.
	Since 1995, the reserves have consistently provided 10 to 15 per cent of the manpower in the former Yugoslavia, and they have been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some 11,000 reservists were mobilised to support Operation TELIC. In all these theatres, the men and women of the Reserve Armed Forces have served with supreme bravery, maintaining the highest military standards in the world. Together, the volunteer Reserve Forces, the regular Reserve Forces and the sponsored reserves provide Her Majesty's Armed Forces with vital support and capability.
	In its February 2005 pamphlet, Future Use of the UK's Reserve Forces, the Ministry of Defence laid out how it had learnt from the use of the reserves in operations such as Operation TELIC. In my view these were welcome and important changes. First, the pamphlet made clear how individuals would be used in their military role rather than for their civilian skills—except in certain narrowly defined circumstances. This policy had not previously been spelt out as a specific undertaking.
	Secondly, the MoD stated that it would aim to mobilise reservists for no more than a cumulative total of one in five years rather than the one in three allowed for in legislation for operations akin to Operation TELIC.
	Thirdly, the MoD pledged to aim to give 28 days' notice of mobilisation, although there remains no statutory requirement to do so. All these changes were designed to help both the reservists and their employers. Overall, employers have been impressively supportive when their employees have been mobilised.
	Of course there have been many stories of undermanning and of recruitment problems within the Reserve Forces, but it is now apparent that all three services are making major efforts to address any shortfalls. Here I mildly take issue with the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, because recent figures for the Territorial Army suggest that numbers for the entire force have recovered to above their April 2004 level. For those elements liable to be deployed on operations, the number is higher than it was in April. Manning levels in both the RAF Reserve and the Royal Marine Reserve are broadly stable and have been for some time.
	Improved recruitment to the Reserve Forces is being supported by increased resources and professional advertising campaigns. The MoD has introduced a number of initiatives to retain the skills and expertise already in the Reserve Forces. These have covered: improved support packages, including improved financial support for reservists and employers; greater access to training courses; intelligent selection for mobilisation; improved pre-deployment training; improved welfare support; and new Reserve Forces pension and compensation schemes.
	Your Lordships' House will be aware that there have been accusations that the Ministry of Defence has been asking reservists to undertake too many mobilisations. I note the issue that the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, raised regarding the reinstatement of employees. The fact remains that there are legal safeguards in the Reserve Forces Act 1996, which limit the amount of mobilised service and protect employees when it comes to mobilisation and reinstatement.
	Numbers of new recruits into the Territorial Army remain relatively high. To improve TA recruiting, the MoD is introducing a new integrated recruiting process, which will provide greater integration and coherence between regular and TA recruiting. There will be: additional funds to improve TA centres; additional funding allocated to support administration, welfare recruiting and employer-support activities; an increase in training days; a PR campaign to improve awareness of welfare support to TA members and their families; and improvements in terms of service.
	A comprehensive welfare study for reserves was commissioned in mid-2004 and reported in November 2005. This resulted in improved communication with reservists and their families, improved access to welfare facilities for families, and better management of the sick and injured.
	After Operation TELIC, a holistic review was conducted into welfare provision, resulting in 35 recommendations aimed at providing consistent best-practise support across the services and covering call-out, mobilisation, deployment and employment, demobilisation and after-care.
	Key recommendations then included: notice given on call-out; timely, relevant and clear instructions to reservists and their families; improved access to welfare support for dispersed families; and management of the sick and injured. I am glad to say that the majority of the recommendations have now been successfully implemented. There have been very few complaints about support for deployed personnel over the past year or so.
	The MoD is actively working to improve other areas that have caused concern, such as the reserves accident insurance policy. The Ministry is actively enhancing employer support. The latest research shows that overall employer attitudes are more positive than they were a year ago.
	The MoD continues to work closely with the National Employer Advisory Board, represented in today's debate by its chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, with the SaBRE Campaign and with the Reserve Forces and Cadets Association, which is represented today by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman. Reservists benefit from legal protection of their employment under the Reserve Forces (Safeguard of Employment) Act 1985—I am sorry, I quoted the wrong Act earlier on.
	It has been said that the rebalancing of the Territorial Army is a cost-cutting exercise. I cannot accept that. In fact, the operating costs will remain about the same. The rebalancing of the TA is about ensuring that we have a Territorial Army that is better able to deal with a whole range of circumstances that it may encounter in the 21st century. It is part of the Future Army Structures work. The TA is being reshaped to be more effective and as it is reshaped it will create new opportunities, such as providing better access to training, equipment and facilities through more frequent integration with the regular Army. The regular Army and the TA will be able to work more effectively and efficiently together.
	The restructuring will make the TA an even more professional force and the regular Army's first choice for support. Restructuring the TA will enhance its capacity to support ongoing and future operations. It will remain with the same establishment of 42,000 but it will be better equipped and supported than ever. Exciting and exacting times lie ahead for Her Majesty's Reserve Armed Forces, and they deserve and expect nothing less than the full support of your Lordships' House.

Lord Freeman: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, because of his exceptionally well informed and well balanced contribution to the debate. I also congratulate—not only on my own behalf but on behalf of these Back Benches—the noble Earl on his good fortune in securing the debate and on a remarkable speech which set the scene so well for the debate that was to follow. This House without an Attlee is as inconceivable as the TA without the noble Earl; long may he serve in both.
	I declare an interest, as the noble Lord has indicated, as the president of the United Kingdom Council of the Reserve Forces and Cadets Associations. The noble Earl represents the serving TA; I represent the thousands of volunteers and civil professionals who support the Reserve Forces in 13 associations throughout the United Kingdom. They do a magnificent job. The noble Lord, Lord Truscott, referred to the strength of the TA now at just over 32,000. I agree with what both he and the noble Earl said when they talked about the stabilisation of that figure over the past 18 months. That is true, but we have to be cautious. While recruitment has been strong, and that has been partly a function of the challenge of serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must be extremely careful about retention. If those figures fall, and they are at about 82 per cent of establishment, then we would be putting ourselves in a very serious position. I accept what has been said, but I caution the House about the instability and fragility of those figures.
	I shall touch on three subjects in the few minutes available to me. First, there is the new structure of the Reserve Forces and Cadets Associations. Your Lordships are well aware of the difficulty of reorganising a voluntary organisation. It is not a question of simply telling and explaining to regular soldiers what is going to happen; you have to carry the voluntary organisation of hundreds, if not thousands, of people with you. That has been achieved; the reorganisation is now in the process of being implemented to make the associations fit for purpose for the next decade. Your Lordships will know that the associations throughout the country help support recruitment and they provide employer support on the ground. My noble friend Lord Glenarthur is to be thanked and congratulated on the work that he and his colleagues do on the National Employer Advisory Board. On-the-ground employer support is vital, with one-to-one relationships between those who serve in the associations and sometimes very small companies which have an employee who is off serving in Iraq.
	I want to say a word about youth and cadet organisations in a moment. There is also the estate. We have a major problem with accommodation for cadets around the country. Almost 1,000 properties up and down the country are not fit for purpose, and frankly they put off the young people. I pay tribute to the instructors who turn up week after week to look after enthusiastic youngsters in sometimes inadequate accommodation. For me, it is a priority to put that right over the next few years.
	First, I briefly but seriously congratulate Brigadier Michael Browne, chairman of the council, Air Vice-Marshal Tony Stables, the retiring secretary who has done a Herculean task in consulting everyone around the country, and Major-General His Grace the Duke of Westminster, the Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, who is a tower of strength in the Ministry of Defence in supporting the work of the reserves.
	My second point concerns rebalancing. I accept that the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, was right that "rebalancing"—another word for re-organisation, particularly of the TA—is not a cost-cutting exercise. It involves some pain because we lose one battalion. I hope that the Ministry of Defence will make announcements in the next few weeks on the exact nature of the reorganisation. However, I accept that we gain with the logistics corps, the intelligence corps, artillery and other specialist units. On balance, it will be beneficial if it is handled sensitively and with the right pace of introduction. We will do all that we can in the country to implement and support the reorganisation. It has been difficult to explain and to gain acceptance but the Government will have our support.
	As the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said, the integration of the TA battalions into the Regular Army is much to be welcomed. I hope that that relationship between an individual TA battalion and a regiment of the Regular Army will be encouraged and will work properly. The TA soldier will very much welcome it.
	I turn to defence in the community. In large parts of the country—with the reorganisation of the Regular Forces into super-garrisons for the Army, fewer airfields and now only three major ports for the Royal Navy—the only footprint comes from the reservist or the cadet. Go to a remembrance service on 11 November, or whichever Sunday is closest to that day, and where you used to find regular troops in attendance you will now find only the reservists and cadets. It is extremely important that we maintain that link between representatives of Her Majesty's forces and the community.
	I commend two initiatives to the Minister. I hope that his colleague Don Touhig, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State with responsibility for the Armed Forces who looks after the reserves—and he does so very well, as did his predecessor the noble Lord, Lord Moonie, whom we have welcomed to this Chamber—will give continued support not only to the Army Cadet Force's outreach programme but also particularly for Skill Force.
	Perhaps I may trouble your Lordships for a few moments to describe Skill Force, which you may not have heard of. It is supported by the MoD—and long may that continue—and currently has about 150 ex-servicemen. Typically, they are ex-warrant officers and sergeants who have come out of uniform but want to stay connected with teaching and encouraging schoolchildren. They are concentrating today on about 4,000 children in about 100 schools across the country, taking 14 to 16 year-olds who cause trouble in the classroom out of the classroom for one day a week of life-skills training. That may be orienteering, canoeing or map reading; it may be trying to encourage their self-esteem. Whatever it is, it has been a terrific success. Every head teacher in every school I have been in has praised the initiative. I pay tribute to the Chancellor, who got the scheme going under the Spend to Save initiative. However, it must continue to grow. Every year, 7,000 servicemen leave and go into civilian life. We are able to employ only 50. We would love to employ 500 of them who could relate to schoolchildren, who would look up to them as mentors and exemplars of self-discipline and self-esteem.
	I associate myself with the remarks of the noble Earl and the noble Lord, Lord Truscott. We should pay tribute to all of the reservists and all the cadet instructors, but particularly to the 12,000 who have left their families and employment, hoping to come back to both, to serve in Iraq. Your Lordships owe them a great deal of tribute.

Lord Inge: My Lords, I too thank the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for securing this important debate. As other noble Lords have said, he has considerable experience of the Territorial Army and, much more importantly, he has been deployed with them on operations, as I know have a number of the speakers who follow. My experience of the Territorial Army is not as close as his, but I was fortunate enough to command a division that was two-thirds and one-third regular, although that was during the Cold War. But it did give me a considerable inside knowledge of the Territorial Army, and I developed a huge respect for their enthusiasm, commitment and ethos. It also made me realise even then how vital they were to the Army's order of battle.
	Since then the Territorial Army has been reduced and reorganised on a number of occasions. As I understand it, the establishment at the moment is about 39,000; but equally at the moment, it is about 80 per cent manned—in other words, they are short of something like 7,000 all ranks. The problem has been compounded by the fact that since 1999 there has been an average haemorrhaging from the TA of around 1,600 a year, and of course many of those who went were those who were the most experienced. Having talked to a number of people, I am told that there is no single identifiable reason for that. It is attributable to a broad range of issues: demands of the family, employers, the Territorial Army's conditions of service, inadequate training, the lack of availability of certain equipment, and to an extent too many operational commitments. The points which the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, portrayed so clearly will be a great help, if they are implemented and successful, in correcting that problem.
	There is no direct indication or evidence to suggest that Iraq is the main reason for people leaving. But it must be wrong to lose so many trained people on a regular basis. As other noble Lords said, significant remedial action is required, because we cannot afford to lose that number of trained, important TA soldiers.
	I am well aware that the manning of the Territorial Army is right at the top of Ministers', CGSs' and Commander Regional Forces' agenda. The TA manning action plan introduces many wide-ranging initiatives, some of which have already been mentioned. It wants to tackle recruiting and, more importantly, retention. It talks about closer integration of the TA with the Regular Army, something that we have been trying to achieve for many years. I hope that it will be possible to achieve it, but we should not underestimate, given the pressures on the Regular Army, the difficulty in achieving it. It is very important, but let us not underestimate the challenges of doing it, simply because the Regular Army is so heavily involved on operations. The establishment of a One Army Regular and Territorial Army recruiting process is enormously important. I wish that we would stop talking about "the Regular Army" and "the TA"; I wish that we would just talk about "the Army", because they both need each other. I am also told that the Government plan to introduce the Territorial Army's conditions of service. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us a little more detail of what they have in mind.
	I am conscious that I have sounded rather negative, but I know that in the past year the TA feels that it may have turned a corner because it has gained more recruits than it has lost. But we should not underestimate the loss of those very important experienced people. It is also worth remembering that, since January 2003, the TA has deployed over 11,400 people on operations. With my simple mathematics, I make that the equivalent of about 19 to 20 battalions. It is an incredible achievement and they have obviously been very effective. Frankly, the Regular Army could not have operated without them. It was an invaluable and significant contribution and a great achievement.
	I understand that, to sustain its support on operations, in future the TA will be limited to a maximum of 1,200 annually to be deployed on operational service. That seems to be making operational assumptions before the operational situation on the ground is clear. As we all know, military operations tend not to pan out in such a tidy way. In addition a TA soldier, unless he is a volunteer, will be asked to deploy on operations only once every five years. I wonder whether that is realistic given the Army's current operational tempo and with Afghanistan just around the corner.
	In conclusion, I pay a huge tribute to the Territorial Army for what it has done and achieved. As I said, the equivalent of 19 or 20 infantry battalions deployed on operations is a huge achievement and speaks volumes for their ability, commitment and dedication. I am not sure, however, that we will able to maintain that tempo. As I and other noble Lords have mentioned, something significant will need to be done if we are not to reproduce in the Territorial Army some of the problems that we have in the Regular Army—problems of size, over-commitment and under-funding.
	The provision of volunteers for operations and so on is being resource and not demand led. The first may not be enough and I just hope that the second will not break the camel's back.

Lord De Mauley: My Lords, I thank and congratulate my noble friend Lord Attlee for initiating this valuable debate. I also pay tribute to the work of the Reserve Forces and Cadets Associations and the National Employers Advisory Board in which my noble friends Lord Freeman and Lord Glenarthur play such key roles.
	I declare an interest as a recent commanding officer of a Territorial Army regiment. Indeed, not much more than a year ago I returned from a visit to Iraq to see my soldiers on operations there, territorial soldiers who themselves were involved first-hand in combat with the enemy. I ask your Lordships to forgive me for constantly referring to the TA instead of the reserves. As you will understand from my background that is what I know, and to a large extent the expressions are probably interchangeable.
	The Strategic Defence Review set out among many other things to make the TA more integrated, relevant, useable and capable. This was broadly enthusiastically welcomed by the Reserves, as evidenced by the many soldiers who subsequently came forward to go on operations. In that context I would like to associate my words with those of the Minister when he answered the Question of my noble friend Lord Astor of Hever on 12 January, when he paid tribute to the great contribution that the Reserve Forces make. He referred to the two MCs, a George Cross and a number of other medals earned.
	I should like to talk about the future in a moment. Before I do so—and I apologise for talking at such a low level after the contributions of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, and my noble friend Lord Freeman—I should raise some problems that arose in the first two years of Operation TELIC while I was commanding my regiment. Although many if not all of them have since been given a great deal of thought, it is worth mentioning just a couple of them as there is a real risk that they may recur. After all, some of them arose due to a lack of understanding of reservist issues combined with insensitivity, especially among those responsible for the mobilisation process—principally regular staff officers, as my noble friend Lord Attlee mentioned. Given that those sorts of officers change jobs every two or three years, there is a high risk that the lessons learned may be forgotten.
	The first and perhaps single most frustrating issue that I encountered was the continual short notice for mobilisation. Despite the fact that this problem was well aired from early on in the piece in 2003, we were still encountering compulsory mobilisation at no more than a week's notice to the individual concerned in the autumn of 2004. That is absolutely unacceptable and unforgivable. The Army by then had several months' notice of their requirements—or ought to have had. Not only did it give the individuals mobilised unnecessary problems in organising their lives, it also completely undermined the efforts that commanding officers and regional Reserve Forces and Cadets Associations were making with employers.
	I understand that the Government's intent is that there should now be four weeks' notice of mobilisation to individuals. However, I emphasise that inflexibility in the system could still mean delays, with the period of notice to the mobilised soldier himself being the bit which inevitably gets squeezed. The noble Lord, Lord Truscott, pointed out that there is no legal requirement for such notice. When we were given more notice, we were able to give extra training to the soldiers to be mobilised, getting vastly better performance from them as a result, including—in response to the Question of my noble friend Lord Attlee on the point—junior TA officers commanding sub-units in action.
	The second concern that I want to raise is our relationship with employers. I visited employers of my soldiers being deployed on operation TELIC 5 in mid-2004. Although those meetings were friendly, in the vast majority, employers were by that stage beginning to show concern that compulsory mobilisations were becoming accepted by the MoD as routine and that they might continue indefinitely. Despite their willingness to help on a personal level, several of them mentioned that they saw compulsory mobilisation as yet another of many additional recent burdens on business. I concluded that there was evidence that, if compulsory mobilisation of sizeable numbers of TA soldiers was maintained at those levels, TA soldiers would begin to be forced to choose between the TA and their preferred civilian career. Clearly, in the medium term, that could have serious effects on sustainability.
	That all sounds as though I have nothing but complaints to give the House, but that is not the case. I will therefore not dwell at length on some of the other problems, including soldiers being underpaid or not paid and the lack of information for the chain of command. That created problems: we were unable to brief our soldiers on what jobs they were going to do when they got to theatre—vital preparation that could have taken place. Also, when the soldiers were in theatre, wives would ring my headquarters and know more about where their husbands were and what they were doing than I did, given the wonders of mobile telephony and the Internet, which undermined my attempts to sustain their morale.
	Despite all that I, and I know the vast majority of reservists, were, and I am sure remain, pleased and proud that they are able to participate alongside the Regular Army on operations and perform to a high standard. The message I would like to send is that with a little more detailed thought and plenty of notice we could do the job so much better.
	I turn to what is happening now and what will happen in the immediate future. I want to talk about two things. The first is the so-called "TA rebalancing". We know that we are expecting the outcome of a review shortly. The purpose of the reshaping is, we are told, to make the reserves "even more effective", "even more professional" and "even more useable". Although I think I understand what is intended, I counsel caution in expecting even more from a part-time force which has already provided, according to the Minister when he answered a Question recently, 20 per cent of the forces, for example, on Operation TELIC 2. Will the Minister reassure me that "even more effective", "even more professional" and "even more useable" are not going to involve the reserves providing 30 per cent, 40 per cent or 50 per cent of the force on future operations?
	My second topic is that of manning. I acknowledge that the worrying decline in manning levels does appear to have slowed and even bottomed out. However, the deficit, which everyone in the Reserve Forces is addressing as their main effort for 2006, is, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, said, a colossal 7,000. I cannot say whether part of the cause of that goes to concerns—much discussed in your Lordships' House—in the minds of soldiers that they might be sent on operations and then charged for murder for simply doing their job, but there is no doubt that, on the current strength of about 32,000, this will require a superhuman effort. It will take money and lateral thinking of the sort not necessarily associated with Army staff officers. As to the money, will the Minister make any sort of commitment as to the amount of money that he will be able to squeeze out of the Treasury for this? It needs to be new money. Squeezing any more out of the existing budget will mean other key objectives being put at risk. Without it, it will fail.
	As to the lateral thinking, can the Minister give us any indication of the original ideas being contemplated actually to find those extra people? Because in 29 years I have personally tried most of them, and I know that to be successful they will need to go in the opposite direction from that in which we have been sent in the recent past, when we have been forced to consolidate into fewer TA centres, closing off whole areas to recruiting and crucially, reducing what is known as the footprint. We have to go where the people are, which, given that many of the conurbations have already been fished out, means we have to look at having more, smaller detachments spread around in smaller towns. That does not need to involve a huge cost—there is scope for sharing premises with cadets and users who need the premises in the working day but not in the evenings and at weekends when reservists need them.
	I understand that there are indications that currently there are fewer TA soldiers coming forward to fill operational posts than is required. That must be a concern. I also understand that Headquarters Land Command intends to mobilise 600 reservists every six months for enduring operations globally. While it is important to continue to exercise the mobilisation machine to prevent it atrophying, I urge the Minister to require the MoD to be sensitive in the amount of pressure that is exerted to achieve this. We must not lean too heavily on the reserves in the quest for smaller regular forces.
	In summary, many good things are happening to the reserves and many changes that have happened have been beneficial, but future change must be managed carefully, with expectations on the MoD's side matched with imaginative and sensitive handling of individual reservists and their employers.

Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I too welcome the opportunity given to us by my noble friend Lord Attlee to debate this important and topical subject. I also join him in warmly thanking and congratulating the reserves of all four services on their enthusiasm, commitment and, indeed, bravery which they have shown in recent years.
	I have been privileged to watch them both in training and on operations in the various capacities which I declared to the House last Thursday, as chairman of the National Employer Advisory Board for Britain's Reserve Forces, as honorary colonel of 306 Field Hospital and as honorary air commodore of 612 (County of Aberdeen) Squadron, Royal Auxiliary Air Force—and in the latter capacity I must say how proud I am to wear my Army pilot's wings on my Royal Air Force uniform, but that is perhaps a bit of an aside.
	I thought it might be helpful to your Lordships if I described some of the work of the National Employer Advisory Board. I have been chairman for three years and was a member of its predecessor organisation, the National Employers' Liaison Committee, for some six or so years before that. It is an unpaid, independent body—technically, a lower tier advisory non-departmental public body—made up of 15 representatives of the public and private sectors, including representatives from the CBI, the IoD, the TUC, chambers of commerce, the EEF, formerly the Engineering Employers' Federation, and employers large and small. We take our informed advice directly to the Secretary of State for Defence and the Chief of the Defence Staff on the employer aspects of reserve activities, and suggest, among other things, how it can be made easier for employers to find it possible to release their people to play a part within the reserves. Our annual reports are lodged in the Libraries of both Houses.
	We also work closely with SaBRE (support for Britain's Reservists and Employers) which is the MoD element dealing most closely with employers. Indeed, we are required to advise on and endorse its marketing plan. By affiliation of our members, we link very closely to the Reserve Forces and Cadet Associations, which my noble friend Lord Freeman has spoken about.
	There will almost always be a debate about the level of resources available, either to the regular forces or to the reserves. I shall not go down that route today. Rather I should like to confine my remarks to ways in which we can help to make the best use of available resources. It is of course true that in recent months, or even in recent years, for one reason or another there have been those who have resigned from the reserves. It is equally true—and this matter has already been touched on—that large numbers have sought to join the reserves. The work that my board has been involved with certainly indicates that there is a complex web of interlocking reasons why these movements in each direction should be so.
	We have played our part in describing the importance of recognising the pressures under which employers are put—and most particularly small employers—when reservists are mobilised for operations. There seems to be universal acknowledgement that the mobilisation notices for Operation TELIC 1, the war-fighting stage of the second Iraq war, were less than ideal. My noble friend Lord De Mauley highlighted those. Many lessons were learnt in this first major compulsory mobilisation under the Reserve Forces Act 1996. Certainly, my board did what it could to distil those matters and played its part in ensuring that the Ministry of Defence understood what procedures would make it easier for employers and reservists in the future, including the matter of the 28-day notice period which the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, mentioned.
	That was at a time when there was no requirement on a reservist to ensure that his employer knew that he was liable to call up. We argued that it was essential that if employers were going to be called on more regularly under the Reserve Forces Act 1996, and with the inevitable reductions in strength in the regular forces post-SDR, honesty was required so that society—the community or whatever one likes to call it—could work together in recognising and delivering the capability of reserves to support the regulars. Employer notification, as it is called, is now in place, and appeals by employers against mobilisation is at an all time low of about 2.1 per cent in relation to the Territorial Army.
	As the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, said last Thursday, substantial moves have subsequently been made to enhance and simplify the practical aspects and to improve the financial awards available to both employers and reservists. For example, an employee who is a doctor can now receive reimbursement of salary up to a maximum of £300,000 a year if he is deployed and will lose out otherwise. Those in the non-medical world can receive reimbursement of salaries up to £200,000. The reimbursements available to employers may not exactly match those totals at present. For example, for a doctor, there is the cost of obtaining locums. In due course, we shall play our part in reviewing the operation of the relevant statutory instrument, SI 859, to ensure that there is not a substantial imbalance and will advise the Ministry of Defence accordingly.
	We increasingly understand that the world of work in its broader sense is changing. Society, within both its military and civilian elements, sees the benefits of core transferable skills—the point referred to by my noble friend Lord Attlee—that are relevant to both aspects. Families and family life are an equally important part of a complex equation. During the coming months, my board will turn its mind to how those various strands can be pulled together. For example, it may be possible for strategic partnerships to be struck with some businesses, perhaps especially those already contracted with the Ministry of Defence, to develop more sustainable ways of maintaining particularly the level of specialist reservist recruiting and retention.
	Intelligent mobilisation; potentially intelligent recruiting; flexibility about the length of deployments, where practicable; interchangeability; and recognition of qualifications: all those are important factors that need to be addressed. Of course employers, whether large or small, should not be expected to bear an unnecessary burden. That is why my board endorses and advises that, other than for moments of crisis, reservists should not normally be expected to be called up for operations for more than 12 months in five years, rather than the 12 months in three years that the Reserve Forces Act 1996 allows. I am glad to know that the defence intent, published last year, acknowledges that.
	I realise that there may be certain pinch points, but the Ministry of Defence will have to be assiduous in ensuring that the five years for which reservists have signed up is not breached other than in exceptional circumstances. If it must be, that indicates that there are either too few regulars, too few reserves or too many commitments.
	It is encouraging to know at first hand that Ministers and the chiefs of staff have taken seriously and debated thoroughly with us many of the topics that have been referred to today. But I leave the House with one other thought. Society—the community, if you like—consists of two elements: civilian and military. Both have their part to play in defence matters. As the concept of more usability of our reserves becomes further developed and enshrined, I suspect that a debate will begin to develop about whether those whom we now call reservists are not more aptly described as auxiliaries. My belief is that if a sounder partnership has to be struck between the regular forces of the Crown, those who volunteer for what is now called reserve service and the communities from which they come, their title should reflect their current role rather than that which existed previously. I suspect that that is a more honest way to reflect within society as a whole the relationship that needs to be struck between both elements of that society. If more interchangeability is to be achieved, such a description may be a very apt way to help to bring it about.

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde: My Lords, I, too, welcome this debate and commend the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for seeking and obtaining the time to discuss this issue. We have not discussed the reserve services specifically in this House for some time, so that is extremely welcome. It is also welcome that it comes from the noble Earl, because of his serving officer status in the reserve services. They are a key asset to our Armed Forces as a whole. Frankly, some operations would not have been sustainable without the involvement and support of those personnel. That is very different from years ago when many people joined up and never saw an operation—they never expected to and never did. That is certainly not the reserve services of today.
	Noble Lords have referred to the reserve services' attitude to their jobs. They are proud, pragmatic, professional and flexible, but all too often in operations they are separate from the regular forces with whom they are working. That occurs less often today, but it still happens. Operation TELIC 2002 is continually cited as the crossroads for the new strategic role of the reserve services. There is no doubt that that was a major change. Looking behind that, at the way in which numbers have dropped over the years, the problems of recruitment and retention do not go back to 2002—they go beyond that.
	I am sure that the Minister will be pleased with the upbeat and optimistic mode of this debate. In this Chamber, we say how proud we are of our reserve services, but we also need to face the problems and issues about which they are unhappy, which I am sure the Minister will want to hear about. This year's Armed Services Pay Review Body report, which was presented to the Prime Minister, refers to the reserve services and their manning levels. It reviewed the bounties and the call-out gratuity. It received evidence from the MoD and the Reserve Forces and Cadets Association, of which the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, will be well aware, as well as visiting two of the reserve units. In November 2005, it took evidence from the Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff for reserves and cadets and the director of Reserve Forces and cadets.
	The current review—TA rebalancing—has met with some concerns that it is a cost-cutting exercise, which I do not accept. I think that it is a genuine review of a service which fulfils an important role in a changing world, which probably needs to change with that changing role. I do not think that it is wrong to carry out the review. I welcome it. It is timely and necessary, although that is conditional on the criteria that it is not a cost-cutting exercise. Let us hope that the Treasury keeps out of the review.
	The Armed Forces Pay Review Body report highlighted the evidence given by the MoD and others. It reported that there is a serious shortfall in manning. The figures are in the report. In June 2004, there was a shortfall of 11 per cent in the Royal Naval Reserve; a shortfall of 15 per cent in the Royal Marines; a shortfall of 9 per cent in the Territorial Army; and a shortfall of 30 per cent in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, where retention is better, although I gather that recruitment is more difficult. The MoD said that the TA 80 per cent minimum sustainability level was fragile and under threat. As a result the Armed Forces Pay Review Body has said that it will examine on a yearly basis the bounty and call-out gratuity, rather than triennially, because it is important.
	I have some experience of recruitment and retention, although it is somewhat outdated because things move on so fast. Retention is essential. Noble Lords will remember that about 80 per cent of Reserve Forces serve for just under five years. If, while investing in more and better training because of changing needs, we could get a better return of service, that would help the overall manning of the Armed Forces. How we achieve that depends on the conditions we offer.
	The noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, who is not in his place, mentioned mobilisation. He is right. Operation TELIC revealed many shortcomings, but I believe that the MoD has learned from that experience. People were given short notice not only to go on operations, but the situation regarding their pay while they were away was very unclear. People did not know how much money for their families would be put into their bank accounts on a monthly basis. That created an atmosphere of disruption and disgruntlement in the families. So the mobilisation process is key, and linked to that is pre-deployment training. That too left much to be desired, but again I believe the MoD learnt from the experience.
	The length of posting to an operation is very important and I welcome the commitment to posting for 12 months every five years rather than the prescribed three years. I hope noble Lords will forgive me for drawing on my experience, but I am rather sceptical about some elements of this. The problem is that the Reserve Forces experience the same skills shortages as those in the regular forces, such as in medical teams, among others. Those reservists are called on more regularly, but I certainly welcome the commitment to move in this direction.
	I want to make a number of smaller points which I believe would help in recruitment and retention. During Operation TELIC it was found that a number of personnel had no life insurance because they could not get it. That problem has been acknowledged and changes made. Families need welfare support. They should be treated in the same way as the families of those serving in the Armed Forces while their next of kin are away, acting as a regular member of the forces.
	The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, mentioned pensions. A campaign is under way at the moment, and this is a complex issue. When reservists are away on training or at their annual camp, if they were to be included in the Armed Forces pension scheme, they would lose out. If this matter were to be addressed, I think it would help in recruitment and retention.
	My final point concerns return to employment. We have the Reserve Forces (Safeguard of Employment) Act 1985 and I know that only a handful of appeals have been made. But anyone who knows about employment practices and the workplace will know that the majority of people do not like to return to an employer who is being forced to take them back. Reserve Forces personnel have said to me, "It is much easier just to pack it in and look for another job rather than represent myself in a situation where, frankly, I am confronted by professionals". I wonder whether the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, which does such wonderful work, may through the bodies represented on it be able to consider this. Perhaps it is a case not of looking at the number of appeals registered but of conducting a survey to find out how many Reserve Forces personnel never return to the employer they left when they were posted.
	The Government have always followed the recommendations of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body, and long may that continue. I hope that when the review body carries out its examination next year, the Government will listen again. I welcome the rebalancing review and I am sure that the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, will seek another debate when the report is published in a few months' time. If he does not, other Members of the House will do so.

The Earl of Shrewsbury: My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Attlee on securing this important debate and I declare an interest as honorary colonel of A Squadron, Royal Mercian and Lancastrian Yeomanry, the Territorial Army cavalry regiment comprising the counties of Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Cheshire and Lancashire. RMLY has its headquarters in Telford and trains people to operate Challenger 2 armoured vehicles, among other skills. I am delighted to tell the House that my youngest son is also a trooper in the RMLY.
	When one reads so much these days about overstretch in the Army—there can be little doubt that there is considerable overstretch which the then Minister was warned about during Options for Change—the Minister will no doubt be pleased to hear good news from the RMLY. Recruitment levels are excellent. Out of a total establishment of 278, on 1 January 2006 manning levels for TA volunteers were 26 officers and 255 other ranks. On Operation TELIC 7 to date, RMLY has provided 108 personnel, more funds have been made available for training days and the kit provided for the regiment has been more than adequate. Again, that contrasts with what the press has reported about the lack of decent and workable kit.
	I wish the press could be somewhat more positive from time to time about our Armed Forces. There are still some niggles in the area of administration, but the past problems of soldiers not being paid, the result of problems while serving on Operation TELIC, have largely been sorted out. However, administration is still not a seamless joint; this needs to be addressed and further improved. Within this tale of largely good news, there are some general concerns. First, political correctness is always hanging around in the background, possibly as a result of press reports of Deepcut and other issues. This has a restrictive effect on the way the regiment can be run from time to time.
	Secondly, as my noble friend Lord Attlee pointed out, there is the issue of the recruitment and training of junior officers. Recruitment of potential officers is by no means easy. While general recruitment is strong and appears to benefit from the fact that recruits might eventually go into theatre, with all its excitement, POs have an increasing number of modules in their training programme, resulting in less time being available in their civilian lives. They spend three weeks at Sandhurst and there is less time available for camaraderie and bonding with their TA colleagues, and it causes conflict with their employers. There is an opinion that questions the worth of training everyone to such a high standard through these modules. In some cases this means wasting money on unnecessary training. When training is needed for mobilisation, should the TA soldiers not be mobilised earlier? Might that not be more cost-effective and morale positive?
	Finally, I want to ask the Minister about future structures for the Territorial Army. There have been a number of delays in the expected announcement. This has caused an amount of uncertainty and serves to lower morale. I understand from my regiment that the date for the announcement is supposed to be 25 January. Will the Minister confirm that that date will be kept to and, if not, when the announcement is likely to be made?
	We are most fortunate to have, in the TA, an army reserve that is dedicated, well trained, competent and highly professional. I have heard, on numerous occasions, comments from regular soldiers and officers paying tribute to the quality of work of the RMLY and I am sure that that is mirrored all the way through the Territorial Army. We have in this country a Territorial Army to be proud of.

Lord Garden: My Lords, I too thank the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for arranging this important debate and sharing with us his great experience of both the strengths and constraints of using reserves. The Minister, at Questions last Thursday, tried to reassure your Lordships that all was coming right with the reserves. The noble Lord, Lord Truscott, has delivered a similar message in today's debate. I want to express my admiration for the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, who gave us statistics and facts, and allowed us to take a measured approach to some of the problems and some of the strengths.
	The debate has of course focused on the Territorial Army, because of both the composition of the speakers and the size of the Territorial Army. In all of this the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy reserves are also important factors to consider. Last week, when I asked about the forthcoming rebalancing exercise for the Territorial Army in Thursday's Questions, the Minister replied:
	"It is not a rebalancing exercise".—[Official Report, 12/1/06; col. 294.]
	This has, of course, sat rather uncomfortably with the debate we have had today and, indeed, with the statement made by the Minister's colleague in the other place, Don Touhig:
	"no final decisions had been taken on the rebalancing of the Territorial Army . . . they are expected shortly and an announcement will follow in the new year".—[Official Report, Commons, 20/12/05; col. 2766W.]
	I was particularly grateful to the Minister for sending to me in Paris the following day, by express means, a letter clarifying this apparent discrepancy. As we now know from the debate today, there is a major exercise under way about the future structure of the Territorial Army. This letter, which I hope has been shared with colleagues—I asked the Minister's office to do so—said:
	"Whilst we aim to ensure that any rebalancing resulting from this exercise will serve to make the Territorial Army more desirable to recruits, this is not its primary purpose. Although the results of the review have yet to be formally agreed"—
	despite, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, making a premature announcement about the future size of the Territorial Army—
	"we do not expect the overall establishment to change greatly as a result".
	I take that to be the assurance sought in my Question last week that the rebalancing exercise will not be used as an excuse to hide shortfalls by reducing establishments to match the strength, as in the rebalancing exercise for the regular forces. I would be grateful if the Minister would confirm my interpretation. Again, it is a reflection of the request for assurance made by the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, that this is not a cost-cutting exercise.
	A case could be made for changing the number of Reserve Forces, but the direction would be upwards not downwards. The size of the Territorial Army was set at 41,200 in the November 1998 announcement by the then Defence Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Since then, we have had Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, placing new demands over a sustained period on our reservists. In response to the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom, in October 2002 it was announced that the reserves would be given another task: a requirement that about 5,000 reservists form the Civil Contingencies Reaction Force. Logic would suggest that you might need extra resources if new and extra unexpected tasks are added, yet the variation in the establishment of the Reserve Forces has been minor.
	We have heard a number of figures today but it would be useful if the Minister could give us the definitive establishment for the Territorial Army. I am working on a figure of 41,610 but I have heard other figures. With such a figure we will be able to judge how the force has varied after restructuring. Yesterday, in a Written Answer, Adam Ingram said that the CCRF size would be part of the Territorial Army review. Is the Minister looking, post the attacks on London this year, to increase the CCRF or to reduce it as part of the rebalancing exercise? It is not clear from the Statement.
	I turn now to the state of our Reserve Forces. I join all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate in paying tribute to the Reserve Forces—the men and women from all three services. We are demanding an enormous commitment from them and they are distinguishing themselves in every operational theatre. The noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, reminded us of all their distinguished service.
	It is right that the Government should review their policy for attracting, retaining, training and deploying reserves. The Defence Select Committee 2004, in its fifth report, includes an interesting quotation from a senior officer, who said that the,
	"future use and structure of the reserves was the most important strategic question facing the Armed Forces post-Operation Telic".
	The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, asked key questions about how it is intended the reserves will be used in the future. It is clear from that Select Committee report that the need for reserves is not just about numbers to replace regulars but also about unique skills—"key enablers", in today's jargon. In some cases, those key skills are no longer available from regular forces. However, as we have heard, reliance on specialist skills can put a disproportionate load on some reservists, even if their overall strength were up to establishment. It is a repeat of the overstretch problem for certain trades within the regular forces. I hope that the Minister will tell us how the restructuring exercises will tackle that problem, because it is one of the most important parts of any restructuring. He may have plans to reduce dependence on reserves because, if they are being used all the time, it might be more sensible to increase the number of regulars in that area.
	The noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, indicated, from personal experience, some of the duty of care problems, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Dean. We have heard about various problems that reservists have but others do not, which need to be addressed. The Defence Select Committee report that I talked about expressed concern about the need for support for families of mobilised reservists. I hope that the Minister can tell us what has been done since June 2004 to respond to that criticism from the Defence Select Committee. There has also been unwelcome publicity about former reservists suing the MoD to recover hospitalisation costs following injuries. How many of these cases are there, and is it widespread? Both last week and today, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, raised the important question of representation at employment tribunals.
	I had intended to spend a little time on the cadet and university organisations, but the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, has said everything that I wanted to say. I declare my interest as president of the London and south-east region air cadets, and a former president of the Combined Cadet Force Association. He is absolutely right: not only are the organisations marvellous, but the staff that look after them are incredibly dedicated.
	Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, has again given us comprehensive insight into the question of employers. We have to pay attention to the position of employers when we think about reserve forces. Some small businesses have to bear a considerable burden, despite the welcome financial compensation from the MoD. They can lose key employees at short notice. I congratulate the Ministry of Defence on the excellent website that we heard about, SaBRE, for supporting Britain's reservists and employers. It is a good one-stop shop for both reservists and employers to understand their rights and obligations. I draw noble Lords' attention to the link to a university report dated October 2005, entitled The potential impact of the Reserve Forces training and experience on business and organisation leadership. The report concludes:
	"The research shows that there is a strong correlation between the key management capabilities developed by Reservists and the key weaknesses identified in general British management.
	"It illuminates the potential for the Reservist to be utilised to address four of the five major management deficits: leadership; process design; communication; team-focused culture".
	We have an academic conclusion that service in the reserves helps business and other organisations rectify their management weaknesses. This is a message not just for employers but also for government. If you want young people to gain skills and motivation, the cadets can do it. If you want employees to develop good management capacity, the reserves can do it. Investment in the Reserve Forces is also investment in the nation. You get two for the price of one: better military operational capability and better civilian workforces. I trust the Government will not put either at risk by making cuts in this important area or by failing to retain those who join the reserves.

Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I also thank my noble friend Lord Attlee for arranging this timely debate. He speaks with real and contemporary experience, and I hope that the Minister will also carefully note the many important points made this afternoon by other distinguished speakers from all sides of the House. I also pay tribute to the outstanding work that our reserve armed forces do. Those men and women are asked to sacrifice a great deal for their country. As honorary colonel of a TA unit, many of whose members have served in Iraq, I have first-hand knowledge of this. My experience is the same as that of my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury: they are dedicated, well trained and highly professional.
	The reserves perform a variety of different roles in the Armed Forces. Some, like doctors, nurses and linguists, have specialist skills. There is also a small but growing number of sponsored reserves, employees of defence-related companies contracted to maintain and repair equipment while deployed on operations. I also congratulate employers who willingly and unselfishly safeguard the employment of our reserves. My noble friend Lord Glenarthur spoke of the effective work that the National Employer Advisory Board carries out, and I pay tribute to my noble friend for the work that he does as chairman.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Dean, mentioned the Reserve Forces (Safeguard of Employment) Act 1985, introduced to prevent reservists losing their jobs because of deployments. Yet I understand that the maximum penalty for employers who breach the provisions on job security is just £1,000. Currently, 24 TA soldiers are involved in court action for compensation or reinstatement at their own expense. I am sure that my noble friend's board is looking closely at the issue of soldiers who are improperly dismissed by employers.
	I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Garden, that we have heard a number of different statistics today. We find it difficult to get really accurate and informative figures on the issue. Will the Minister and his colleagues consider issuing regular Written Statements giving information on numbers, state of readiness and the use of deployable reserves to enable us to follow trends accurately?
	Certainly, the strength of the TA is at its lowest level since it was founded in 1907, with resignations running at three times the level experienced prior to the beginning of the Iraqi deployment. My noble friend Lord Freeman pointed out that we should be careful to ensure that retention figures did not drop any further. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, said that we could not afford to lose as many good soldiers as we are at the moment.
	The situation is worse than the figures show, in that up to 20 per cent of those on the roll of reservists fail to perform their training requirement, disqualifying them from being called up. Numbers alone do not reveal the complete picture. Additional responsibilities have been given to the TA on top of its liability for service in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia. Post-9/11, the civil contingencies reserve force has been created to provide a vital capability for operations in the event of a terrorist attack or major disaster. What effects will there be on the CCRF, given that the TA is probably around 5,000 personnel short of the MoD's required strength? If there is a serious outbreak of avian flu, for example, will our Reserve Forces be able to provide cover while plugging gaps abroad? Over 1,500 reservists are currently mobilised in support of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere. In Iraq alone since the start of Operation TELIC, as many noble Lords have said, more than 11,000 reservists have been deployed. Last Tuesday in another place, Adam Ingram announced a new order to commit Reserve Forces to operations in Iraq until 3 January 2007.
	If TA soldiers are to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for six months, they need good, pre-mobilisation training to prepare them for the job. That is done in their spare time. In the weeks running up to a deployment, TA soldiers will want to spend time with their family. Many will work long hours to secure their finances and their job for when they return. There is a real danger of TA soldiers being deployed without having completed sufficient training, having been signed off as ready for operations by their commanding officers, who have allowed for difficulties in the provision of training.
	My noble friend Lord Attlee mentioned recruiting and retention problems caused partly by the public's view of current operations in Iraq. We are aware that reservists returning from deployment to main employment sometimes face hostility from their work colleagues who are hostile to the military operation in Iraq and do not see why they should have to carry a share of the cost of conducting it.
	I congratulate my noble friend Lord Freeman on the work that he does with the Council of the Reserve Forces and Cadets Association. I welcome his priority to upgrade as many of their properties as possible. I was grateful last week to the Minister for his reply to my Written Questions about sea cadets. I am patron of a vibrant and active local sea cadet unit, but, as a charity separate from the MoD, the sea cadets need considerable support to continue their work. My noble friend Lord Freeman will not be surprised to hear that they were the only unit wearing military uniforms at the Remembrance Day service last year.
	Students who join the university air squadrons are now denied flying training. Instead they are offered personal development and just 10 hours of flying. That is emphatically not the way to recruit and encourage potential pilots. The deplorable decision to change the role of the UASs was taken during the Recess, and Parliament was not given the opportunity to debate it. Considering that 60 per cent of RAF pilots come from the UASs, will the Minister therefore reconsider the decision? Will he also give assurances that students in University Royal Navy Units will not have their time at sea reduced in the same way?
	My noble friend Lord De Mauley, who commanded the Royal Wessex Yeomanry, mentioned the short notice for mobilisation. My noble friend Lord Attlee mentioned medical support. Welfare treatment of TA soldiers injured on operations is not uniform with regular personnel. If a regular is injured, their care is managed by their regiment and the established casualty treatment process. That is with a view to getting the injured person back to their unit. But a TA soldier who is injured will receive care within the military system until the deployment is over. The individual would then have their care managed by the NHS, where they would go to the bottom of the waiting list. If the injuries are more severe, treatment will be given through the established casualty treatment process. The individual will not receive the same pastoral care from their unit, as they will all have returned to their normal job. My noble friend Lord Attlee pointed out that nearly everyone who was of use had been called up for operations. Does the Minister feel that there is a risk that the pool of eligible reservists will dry up if the current rate of deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq continues?
	The SDR diminished the role of the TA post-Cold War and reduced its establishment. Should the Government now consider a fundamental reappraisal of the role of the TA and the other Reserve Forces? The Government must not carry on using the TA as a cheap standing army. As my noble friend Lord De Mauley said, employers are beginning to complain about another burden on business. Finally, I hope that the Government will rethink the way that they look after the people serving in the Reserve Forces.

Lord Drayson: My Lords, it is clear to me from the contributions that I have enjoyed listening to throughout this afternoon's debate that the thorough and informative review that we have heard emphasises the high esteem in which the Reserve Forces are held in the House. That is a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly associate the Government.
	It is equally clear, as is so often the case in the House, that many of the contributions are made with the authority that comes from direct experience of the matter in hand. In that respect, I pay particular tribute to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, not only for securing the opportunity to have these matters discussed this afternoon but for the service that he has rendered to the Crown as a member of the Territorial Army.
	Against that background, I pay particular heed to the misgivings that have been voiced about the current health of the reserves. In closing, I hope that I can assuage some of those concerns, although I was grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, for his emphasis on the experience that he has seen in his unit. I am particularly grateful for the comments he made about the excellence of the kit. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, emphasised that the situation was overall a good story. That is a sentiment with which many of us would agree.
	Let me turn directly to the foremost of the issues to which my attention has been drawn in the debate: the manning of the Reserve Forces and in particular of the Territorial Army. It has been pointed out to me, most clearly by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, and my noble friend Lady Dean, that the current strength is somewhat short of the establishment of the force. The noble Lord, Lord Garden, asked me for the specific numbers. I am happy to confirm that the establishment number is 41,610. I acknowledge that that is the situation. However, it is not a new phenomenon. That is not to belittle its importance, but to simply state that undermanning has been a historical reality in the Territorial Army. That is the case whether one looks at the period in 1999 prior to the restructuring of the force following the implementation of the Strategic Defence Review; at 1995, before the enactment of the Reserve Forces Act 1996; or indeed earlier.
	Nevertheless, improving the situation is the department's top priority. It requires resources and management action to be directed towards the twin areas of recruitment and retention. To illustrate the moves being taken, the Army and the Navy are combining their regular and reserve recruiting operations under a single professional organisation. I commend to noble Lords the double-decker buses going down Whitehall bearing the advertising campaign, which shows that integration of approach. I was asked by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, in particular, for us to talk about one Army; that is exactly what the advertising campaign does. Furthermore, the TA recruitment budget was increased from £5 million in 2003–04 to £10.5 million in 2004–05. A number of other initiatives are aimed at making staying in the reserves a more attractive proposition.
	As my noble friend Lord Truscott has highlighted, there is evidence to suggest that the downward trend in the strength of the TA is being arrested. I am happy to give the House figures. The fundamental strength within the total of 37,430 as at 1 December is greater than the figure for either April 2005—36,180—or even the figure for April 2004—37,210. Concentrating particularly on the operational elements of the TA, we can see that there is also a slight increase over the past few months, with the number having risen by 270 over that for April 2005, without having yet recovered to the level of April 2004. It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from those figures, and I do not want to give the House the impression that we are doing that. We will not become complacent, but it is welcome to see those early signs that our strong efforts are having an effect.
	There may be disquiet in some quarters about the wide scope of the activities that reservists are undertaking and the resultant scale and tempo of usage of the Reserve Forces. Such fears are misplaced. Reserves are there to be used. The Government are clear on that, and it has been explicitly stated in our document The Future Use of the UK's Reserve Forces, which has been laid before the House. The Reserve Forces are busy, but those commitments are not unmanageable. A culture of mobilisation is developing that reflects the aspiration in the Strategic Defence Review that the reserves should be a more flexible and usable component of defence capability.
	I draw noble Lords' attention to a different set of figures, of which the Reserve Forces can be justifiably proud, which set out in numerical terms the tremendous contribution that our reserves have made to operations in recent years. The figures tell of the 12,565 mobilisations in support of Operation TELIC since 2003. The numbers show how reserves have consistently constituted over 10 per cent of personnel deployed on major operations. The figures show the output of the Reserve Forces in operational terms. That contribution is both valuable and valued and gives a positive picture of forces full of vigour. However, the numbers alone can never do full justice to the qualities of the individuals that they represent—be it Royal Marines Reserves stationed to protect the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, Royal Engineers preparing for the arrival of new NATO forces in Afghanistan, or instructors teaching cadets here in the United Kingdom. I pay tribute to them all.
	Given the range of tasks on which they are engaged, usage of the Reserve Forces is being very carefully monitored to ensure that those forces remain able to meet current and future needs. That is achieved through forecasting future requirements and mobilising reserves only at a level that ensures that a continuous supply is available for subsequent years. The individual is protected by our policy, announced last year, through which we intend to limit mobilised service to a maximum of one year in five—subject, of course, to any over-riding operational imperative—and the use of intelligent selection to identify those willing to serve on particular operations.
	It is therefore not the case that more pressure is being put on the Reserve Forces than they are able to bear. Indeed, in many quarters there is a thirst for the opportunity to go on operations. Such deployments also have the benefit of relieving pressure on the regular forces. It is quite appropriate for the military to look across the entire spectrum of forces to provide a given capability. It has been routine practice for many years for the reserves to deliver support to enduring operations.
	As the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and my noble friend Lord Truscott have said, the level being provided by reserves in Iraq—approximately 10 per cent of the force—is of similar proportions to that which has historically been the case in the Balkans. I assure the House, particularly the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, that that is not done at the expense of harming our reserve component. Following the peak of operations in Iraq we have throttled back on use of the reserves, ensuring that we do not overheat the system. At the peak of operations, in the first six months of 2003, over 7,000 reserves were mobilised for operations in Iraq. In the comparable period of 2004, that was reduced to 1,500 and to approximately 800 in 2005.
	The noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and my noble friend Lady Dean also mentioned issues related to notice of mobilisation. We accept that, especially during the early phases of Operation TELIC, mobilisation was, of necessity, often at short notice. That may even have occurred in the case of some soldiers in 2004, although advance notice of mobilisation has progressively improved since the start of the operation. Our intention is to give 28 days' notice. That was introduced in 2005 and is, generally, being complied with, although operational circumstances will occasionally dictate otherwise.
	The integration of reserves into a whole-force concept, in planning for operational commitments, is mirrored in changes to the structure and management of the forces themselves. Those are designed to reinforce the relationship with the regular component in order to better enable the delivery of defence capability.
	A number of noble Lords mentioned the rebalancing of the Territorial Army. The ongoing work on that is designed to ensure that the TA has the most appropriate structure to support the Regular Army operationally. It focuses the TA on providing support at the large scale of effort, while acknowledging that it will continue to provide forces below that large scale and emphasises a closer relationship between the TA and regular units. The final outcome of that exercise is due to be announced shortly. I shall answer directly the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, and say that it will be within the next month or so.
	We have already said that there should be little change to overall TA numbers or, indeed, the distribution of the estate as a result. I trust that that is clear enough for the noble Lord, Lord Garden. However, some change in units' roles will be necessary. I recognise that that may be an emotional issue for some but believe that the TA will remain more relevant as a result. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, for voicing his support for the rebalancing exercise.
	The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, raised the issue of training and ensuring that operational training had sufficient funding provided for it, particularly overseas. We fully recognise that challenging and exciting training, including overseas exercise, is a key element in encouraging retention. Cancellations occurred as a result of financial pressure some two years ago, but in the past 12 months reserves have participated in exercises in America, Cyprus, Germany and Poland. We are investigating opportunities for expanding that programme.
	It is important that our policy on the use of reserves is well communicated and properly understood—by the reservists themselves, through their families, with information passed down the chain of command, and by the reservists' civilian employers, who play a vital role in supporting our Reserve Forces. That is why the SaBRE publicity and information campaign is so important. I pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, and the work of the National Employer Advisory Board, which he chairs. Indeed, only this morning they met officials from the department. I assure noble Lords that the advice that they give us is listened to and acted on carefully.
	We believe that we can build successful relationships with employers because both sides stand to benefit, as a number of noble Lords have mentioned. The forces can draw a wide range of skilled and talented people from the civilian workforce, as was highlighted by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, who asked why we did not have a list of the civilian capabilities of our people. That list is being put together as I speak. However, we must recognise that it is our policy to use people in the Reserve Forces not for the skills that they have in civilian life but for the skills for which they have been trained in the reserves. We know that skills and characteristics are in great demand, and the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, has already reported that employer objections to the mobilisation of employees are at a low ebb. Most concerns are resolved informally between the employer and the services—indeed that has been so successful that the last case formally registered for an appeal hearing was in August 2004, and even that was subsequently withdrawn.
	We recognise reservists' concerns that they are vulnerable to dismissal or discrimination, something that has been highlighted by a number of noble Lords. However, there is little evidence that such discrimination occurs. We are aware of only 28 registered cases appearing before a reinstatement committee out of over 13,000 mobilisations in the past 10 years.
	As we ask our reserves to do more in operational terms, employer support is just one area where we will ensure that we deliver the required support. In order to maintain strong and healthy Reserve Forces, we must also recognise their essential differences from the regular forces and cater for them wherever possible. Last April, we introduced new regulations to make payments to reservists who are called out and to their employers. The regulations allow a reservist's pay on call out to match his civilian earnings up to a maximum ceiling of £200,000 per annum. It can go further than that, with special arrangements applying to certain medical officers. Employers can claim up to £40,000 per year to cover any additional costs arising from a reservist's absence.
	I reassure the House and the noble Lord, Lord Astor, that mobilised reserves receive access to medical care on the same terms as their regular counterparts. They have the same operational welfare package and the same entitlements to pay and allowances. This year, the Government have also introduced the new Reserve Forces pension scheme and the Armed Forces compensation scheme. The latter is a significant enhancement of reservists' conditions of service because it takes into account a reservist's civilian as well as his military earnings, even when training. We are also developing better support to families back home when reservists are serving overseas. Special requirements are necessary because, unlike regulars, reservists do not live in close-knit communities. We are developing training opportunities that deliver full benefit and rigour but fit in with the reservist's pattern of service, availability and ability to undertake it.
	I finish by reiterating the Government's debt of gratitude to the Reserve Forces of the Crown. Their quality is unsurpassed world-wide, and they are delivering more than ever before in operational output. We are committed to setting the conditions to enable them to continue to do so. The Government have a strong record in providing enhanced support for the reserves. We will not rest on our laurels, but nor shall we be reticent in defending our record of support to the Reserve Forces. Above all, I reassure noble Lords of our determination to ensure that we continue to deliver a reserve component that meets the needs of defence as a whole.

Earl Attlee: My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords for their kind words. It has been a great privilege to introduce the debate. I agree with nearly everything that has been said and, where I do not, it is probably because I am wrong or inaccurate.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, talked about insurance. When I was on operations in Iraq, I received a letter from my insurance company telling me that I was not insured for war risks; so, if I was killed, my family would not get the benefit of my house, and my mortgage would not be paid off. That is pretty outrageous.
	My noble friend Lord De Mauley suggested smaller, more numerous detachments. He is right. Some units are now too widely dispersed. Small detachments in towns adjacent to the unit's headquarters would be rewarding for a junior officer, because he would have his own bit of real estate.
	My noble friend Lord Shewsbury gave further insight into the problem of junior officers. He is right about unnecessary training, but we should never rely on pre-deployment training being available. On Operation TELIC 1, I received negligible pre-deployment training but, in my TA career, I never expected to get much in the way of pre-deployment training, because Ministers never make decisions early enough for the military. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Firearms

Lord Marlesford: rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what progress they are making in setting up a central register of persons who have applied for or have been granted a shotgun or firearm certificate, as required by Section 39 of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997.
	My Lords, I thank noble Lords who are going to take part in this debate.
	On 1 October 1997, Section 39 of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 came into force. It required the Government to set up a central register of persons who have applied for, or been granted, a shotgun or firearm certificate. Eight years and three months later, the Government have still not done so. What private individual would be allowed to get away with failing to comply with the law for over eight years? What sort of example is the Home Office setting to the British people by this defiance of Parliament? The Association of Chief Police Officers recommended a national register in 1996. There is no dispute inside Parliament on the need for the register.
	I have been looking at the back numbers of the magazine Computing, which has taken a professional interest in this failed public project. Their headlines tell a sorry tale. In May 2002, one read: "Whitehall pilots firearms register: database was recommended five years ago"; in October 2002: "UK guns database delayed again"; in March 2003: "Guns database due in summer 2004"; in December 2003: "Work starts on national gun register"; in July 2004: "Police forces start firearms database trial"; in October 2004: "Firearms database delayed once again"; in November 2004: "Home Office blames IT trouble for register delay"; in July 2005: "UK police set to pilot register"; and, in the issue of Computing published today: "New delay to gun register. Data quality problems halt latest police pilots of firearms database". The editorial comment in today's edition of Computing is:
	"It seems preposterous that it could take nine years to install what is essentially a simple records database".
	The far bigger and more complicated central register of vehicles and driving licenses, with real time access for all police forces to millions of records, has been fully effective and in operation for over 25 years. If Ministers are to be believed—and of course I believe them—Hansard records their desperate efforts to prod the Home Office into action. The late Lord Williams of Mostyn, who at the time told me privately how frustrated he was with the Home Office over this matter, said in December 1998:
	"The Government are fully committed to meeting their obligations under this Act".—[Official Report, 17/12/98; col. WA 187.]
	The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, who is kindly replying to this debate, has on no fewer than six occasions reassured the House that:
	"The firearms application has been inserted into the Police Information Technology Organisation's work plan for 1999/2000".—[Official Report, 11/10/99; col. WA 15.]
	That was in October 1999.
	"The Government remain fully committed to . . . Section 39 . . . and view the national register as a priority development".—[Official Report, 2/11/99; col. WA 82.]
	He later said that,
	"the database is still expected to be operational around February 2002".—[Official Report, 23/04/01; col. WA 27.]
	The Minister's noble friend Lord Rooker briefly carried the torch and he was "fully committed". He, too, optimistically trusted the Home Office:
	to February 2003, with roll-out to all forces completing in May 2003".—[Official Report, 16/5/02; col. WA 63.]
	By January 2003, there were public indications of ministerial disillusion with the Home Office. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, admitted:
	"It has been badly delayed".
	But then he added hopefully:
	"We are getting on with it".—[Official Report, 16/1/03; col. 354.]
	By January last year, the Government were openly asking the House to help them get a grip on the Home Office. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said:
	"We are trying to avoid a computer fiasco . . . Our expectation is that we will probably be ready to roll out by July this summer . . . I want this House to pursue Ministers, and Ministers to pursue officials, on the matter . . . there has been an overall increase in the level of gun crime . . . It needs to be tackled very seriously. Getting the national database up and running is part of tackling it".—[Official Report, 27/1/05; cols. 1388-91.]
	Two months later, his sentiments were echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, the present Minister of State at the Home Office:
	"Those matters are being energetically looked at, not least because I am confident that the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, and others will continue to press this issue, rightly, until they get an answer. That is a helpful spur to those of us who come to the Dispatch Box".—[Official Report, 22/3/05; col. 112.]
	So I hope that the Government, if not the Home Office, will welcome this debate as a further sharp pressure from the spur.
	What is the essence of the problem? There are two possible explanations: first, that the Home Office has, for its own reasons, been deliberately undermining attempts of the Government to meet their obligations under Section 39 of the Act; secondly, that the Home Office is hopelessly incompetent at implementing a centralised computer-based national register of firearms. I would remind the House that the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, told us that the Home Office has already spend £5.6 million of taxpayers' money on the project.
	Let us examine the evidence for these two possibilities. On the first, we have the well known "not invented here" attitude of the Home Office which has always resented and resisted ideas from outsiders which it sees as invading its sovereignty. When in April 2000 the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons, then chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, reported on the delay, and, incidentally, concluded that it regarded the register as,
	"absolutely central to the safe and effective operation of the firearms licensing system",
	the Home Office evidence to the Committee revealed an interesting attitude to Parliament. It said that it was,
	"significant that Section 39 did not come from the police or the Home Office . . . but in an amendment tabled in the House of Lords . . . and forced to a division and carried".
	It would seem that the Home Office is not prepared to allow such parliamentary impertinence to triumph. I believe that it has been playing a game of "Yes, Minister", using every trick to ensure that Section 39 is never implemented. I do not believe that the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, if he has been allowed to see the full official files, will be able to put his hand on his heart and say that he has found no signs of obstruction.
	Frankly, I must say that if Home Office Ministers are really incapable of directing that department, admittedly perhaps the most constipated in Whitehall, they should either split it into manageable proportions or hand it over to politicians who can control it. If the second possibility—that of technical incompetence—is the explanation for the failure, the Government should pull the legislation for national identity cards until they can find an organisation competent to introduce them.
	On the firearms register, I make a suggestion which I hope the Home Office will not find too insulting. The congestion charging system by Transport for London was introduced with barely a hitch. It is vastly bigger and more complicated than the national firearms register. So let the introduction of the firearms register be handed over to the Mayor of London.
	My final word is this: there are those of us in this House who will not let this matter drop.

Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, on holding this debate and pay tribute to his tenacious persistence over this matter—nine long and weary years. I am so glad that my noble friend Lord Rooker, who is now exiled to Northern Ireland, has encouraged us to keep on pressing the Government about it. I also make immediately clear to my noble friend Lord Bassam that any brickbats I may hurl around this Chamber are not directed at his sensitive head. They will have an address on them when I use them.
	The backdrop to this debate is that we are in seven weeks away from the unhappy 10th anniversary of the massacre at Dunblane Primary School of 16 innocent children and their head teacher, Gwen Major. Our deep sympathies remain with their families and with those injured. That massacre was carried out by Thomas Hamilton, whose behaviour and mental condition meant that he should never have been allowed to handle or hold any kind of firearm. That horrific event and another at Hungerford reveal that the police often simply had insufficient information about those holding licences and no way of checking that an application made in Plymouth which was refused was not repeated in Preston or Peebles.
	That is why the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, persuaded this House of the need to set up a national register of those applying for certificates, holding them and those whose certificates had been renewed. That was when the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 was going through this House. Two years later, nothing had happened. In April 2000, the Commons Home Affairs Committee, which I had the privilege to lead, in its unanimous report on the controls over firearms, concluded:
	"We are appalled that the national database for certificate holders . . . is not yet in immediate prospect, over two years after the implementation of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997. We regard this system, which will allow the swift and effective exchange of information on applications made for certificates between all police forces, as absolutely central to the safe and effective operation of the firearms licensing system".
	Nine years later, the national firearms registration system is still not operating. It piles dismay on disappointment to be now told that one of the reasons for the failure of the pilots last November in two forces—the Metropolitan Police and Lancashire Police Authority—was the shambolic state of present police firearms records. Poorly formatted addresses and postcodes were examples given, as well as the problems of national police forces being able to use IT to communicate one with the other because of the whims in system selection by chief constables.
	I have to tell the Minister—and I want him to make this clear to those responsible in the Home Office—that the seeming inability of the Association of Chief Police Officers and Home Office officials to get the national registration system in place is a betrayal of those parents whose children were savagely taken from them at Dunblane. The delay is a litany of deception, deceit and duplicity, which leads me to believe that some senior police officers and senior Home Office officials do not want the registration system in place. I firmly believe that there are strong grounds for the National Audit Office to investigate what has gone on and why.
	What has happened is more like the Keystone Kops than a modern and efficient police service. It is not the £5 million to £6 million that has been spent to such small effect, it is the frustrating and obstruction of the will of Parliament on behalf of people to whom promises of better control over firearms were made. Successive Ministers were told by officials that one reason for the delay was the need to give priority to the establishment of a link between the police national computer criminal records and the new national DNA database. That was achieved in November 2001, although I was not told about it until my noble friend Lady Scotland answered a Written Question from me on 30 June last year. To my knowledge, no Minister had given that information before. That was four years ago, but as one excuse departs, another one comes along immediately behind. On 4 November 2004, my noble friend Lord Rooker told the House that a pilot of the new system was run in the summer of 2004. Unhappily it could not print the certificates, which some may see as a major drawback, and the system was much too slow for the police operational service—which seemed to have plenty of time on its hands. That is after nine years.
	On 4 October in 2000, in their response to the Home Affairs Committee report, the Government pledged that,
	"the database will be up and running in 12 to 15 months time"
	That would be the end of 2001 or early 2002. Like every other target given in the development of this database, it was not met. The last promise on live testing of the system was that it would start at the beginning of July 2005. That was from my noble friend Lady Scotland on 22 March 2005. I will not surprise your Lordships by saying that that did not happen either.
	Testing did not start until November and, after two or three weeks, it was abandoned because of data errors. I understand that a project review group met as lately as yesterday to assess the situation. I am hoping that the Minister can tell us what it decided; although I read in the Times this morning in a small news report that we are now promised that it will go into operation in April. Perhaps the Minister will have time to comment on that.
	I understand that the revised pilot testing—I thought it was planned for March, but it has slipped again even before it is announced—will be in April. I ask him to confirm this. But, having been told years ago, and consistently, that the system was no good without an interface with the police national computer, can he confirm that this revised testing will be done without using this available interface? As I say, as fast as one problem is put up and seemingly overcome, another one comes behind and overtakes it.
	Gun crime rose by 5 per cent in the year to June last year, even though it is a rare crime. I have to say that two in every three offences happen in the Metropolitan Police area, in Manchester and, sadly, in my home area of Birmingham and the West Midlands. Over the same period there has been a drop of 8 per cent in the criminal use of handguns and a decrease, from 70 to 60, in homicides involving firearms. I especially welcome the new fund, which has supported 179 community groups in England and Wales, on gun crime and related issues and which has been running since May 2004.
	There is such concern over the absence of a national firearms management system because it is vital to the drive to contain and reduce gun crime. It will provide for the first time intelligence available to every police force on a single accessible system. That is the nub of the thing and that is the vital system the police need to have. More than that, it will demonstrate that the Government are serious about this issue and add a sense of security to those communities whose lives are blighted and threatened by crimes involving guns.

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, on obtaining this debate. I also congratulate him on the remarkable persistence that he has shown over the years in pursuing this matter. I admit to being a newcomer in this regard, but I am not a newcomer in trying to do battle with the Home Office in order to get them to recognise the need to do things that are clearly self-evident.
	In 1989, when I was commanding the field army, we had a home defence exercise, during which I was trying to persuade the police, fire services and a number of voluntary organisations to take part in a weekend exercise in the park which would test the response to natural disasters and other emergencies. It was a most appallingly frustrating business trying to get the Home Office to respond. One day, I went down to my briefing centre and found written on the blackboard, the words, "Cast your bread upon the waters . . . and you will get soggy bread". Underneath were the words, "The Home Office".
	In 1997—I do not know what it is about 1997, the year in which this saga started—another organisation with which I am associated conducted an experiment in a young offenders' establishment that used a mixture of minerals, fatty acids and vitamins to conclusively prove that, using the right mixture, you could reduce anti-social behaviour by 40 per cent. The Home Office questioned the data and put in its own statistician. He came back saying that the data was 92 per cent statistically pure—an unheard of result—and that he had never come across such excellently conducted research. Nine years later, we are still waiting for action from the same Ministers whose names have been cited in the roll-call of those who have tried to get the register in place. Only last Thursday, I received a message from the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, saying that she had agreed to another trial—nine years later. I hope that that is a portent that the register may also see the light of day in 2006.
	I have a particular reason for wanting a register of firearms, bearing in mind my military background: its need for all those who are involved in any way in law and order activities against crime and terrorism. It is frustrating not to have it available; I often wondered why it is not.
	When I looked for a reason, I was forced back to the Royal Commission on the Police of 1962, which is the last time that there was a serious outside look at the structure of the police. Since then, there have been a number of internal inquiries. The latest, following the recommendation of the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, was discussed only last week in the other place and I look forward to it being discussed here. At the end of the royal commission report, there is a dissenting verdict by Dr AL Goodhart, the father of the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, who plays such a vigorous part in the activities of this House from the Liberal Democrat Benches. Dr Goodhart's objection was that many activities involving criminals required something more efficient and effective than separate, local police forces. He called for something akin to a national police force. He stated:
	"In regard to the efficiency of the police system as a whole the Commission recognises that under modern conditions a certain amount of joint action on the part of various police forces is essential. This is most obvious in urban areas, but it is also true in less populous ones. The emphasis on crime squads and on traffic control are clear examples. If experience in other fields is any guide, it seems to be self-evident that such joint action can be more effectively achieved under a centralised control and under existing conditions".
	He concluded:
	"It is my duty to recommend those measures which seemed to me to be necessary if the police force is to be made efficient in the circumstances of the present day".
	We should consider the consequences of the delay in the introduction of the register for the people who will get most value from it, the police; nine years later, we are still waiting for it. I suspect it is because there is no one champion in the police, which there would have been if there was some form of national police force, to drive home the need to have it to make police operations collectively more effective. I have long been in favour of a national police force, especially for serious crime—the end of the spectrum that makes local policing and the exchange of information between different forces so complicated and difficult that it does not happen. In considering the implementation of this law, which has waited so long to be actioned, it may be that this is another reason for going for more efficient policing to make certain that someone is in charge of seeing that this long-needed register is at last brought into action.

The Earl of Shrewsbury: My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to take part in this debate. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Marlesford on his thorough persistence on this matter. I declare an interest as the former chairman of the Firearms Consultative Committee, the current chairman of the British Shooting Sports Council and president of the Gun Trade Association. It is suffice to say that I am slightly enthusiastic about the shooting sports industry.
	I well remember my noble friend's persuasion of this House to pass an amendment to provide for a central register on computer of all firearms licence holders. Among many from all parties, I, too, voted for it. I thought that it was an excellent idea. In official evidence submitted by the Home Office to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, as mentioned already by my noble friend, it said that it was,
	"significant that Section 39 did not come from the police or the Home Office".
	I find that fascinating. I was at that time chairman of the Firearms Consultative Committee, whose remit it was to advise the Home Secretary on matters concerning firearms. My vivid recollection is that such a register was discussed widely by the FCC and supported by the representatives of the Association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales, the British Shooting Sports Council and the representatives of the Forensic Science Service. If my memory does not fib to me, the reason behind this thinking was that such a register on computer would enhance the safety of the public, which is the most important single thing here; would add considerably to the safe and effective operation of the firearms licensing system; and would be of considerable use in the tracing of stolen firearms. Finally, it was regarded by the shooting organisations as being a positive step forward. All that together is seriously positive, which you do not often get in the gun world.
	Yet, here we are some eight or nine years later, following delay after delay, approaching nearly £6 million in costs and with an awful lot of egg left on the face of many Ministers and the Home Office. Why does the Home Office appear to be so against the register? Why has this astonishing exercise in waste and inefficiency occurred? Who is to blame? Surely, in these days of great high technology, it cannot be without the wit of the Home Office and its technical advisers to come up with a workable system. It simply cannot be that complicated.
	I wonder whether the Minister can help with another slightly related matter, which regards slippage from the Home Office as well. I mentioned the FCC, which was abandoned recently by Her Majesty's Government. But when it went, there was an undertaking, as I believe it, in 2004 to replace it with a firearms advisory committee. No more has been heard about this. Nothing seems to have been done on that front. Yet the Government are always stating their intention to bear down on gun crime. Surely, this is a tool in that initiative. In addition, where is the promised summary of the Government's controls on firearms consultation exercise in 2004? Yet again there has been slippage.
	My noble friend is right. It is absolutely proper for him to harry Her Majesty's Government on the matter of this register. It is a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs which must be concluded without further delay.

Viscount Eccles: My Lords, I was persuaded by my noble friend Lord Marlesford to join in this debate. He said, "Don't you realise that this whole thing started before you were here for your first short incarnation and it is still going on now that you have come back into the House?". I must declare an interest. I have a shotgun certificate, which is issued by the county of North Yorkshire police from the county town of Northallerton. It lasts for a number of years; it has a photograph; it has the number of the gun, which is unique; it has the maker of the gun, which is completely certain; it has my date of birth; and it has the correct address and postcode. If necessary, I could give my unique national insurance number. I am sure that all that information is stored on a computer, because I am always reminded in good time before the certificate runs out. Moreover, they always check that the gun is being kept in secure storage and, of course, you cannot buy cartridges unless you present your certificate. In the north of England, shops insist on seeing the certificate. I do not always go to the same shop, but the shopkeeper always takes a good look at the certificate.
	The data held on that certificate, together with my national insurance number, are quite sufficient to create a database. No more information is needed. I have been involved in a certain number of databases. They can be set up with conventional software and IT consultants are not necessary. Two bright 24 year-old graduates with computer skills sitting alongside two senior policemen who understand what is involved and what they want could set up the database within a year. In the ordinary purposes of private industry, if we could not create that sort of database in about 12 months, we would be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.
	The puzzling question is this: what has happened in this strange situation? Members on the Back Benches can only speculate, but I believe that we have a certain public interest reason for being told about this. The lessons that need to be learnt here surely go far and wide, more particularly since the players are under the same ministerial control; that is, the police and the Home Office.
	It has been said that one police computer cannot talk to another. That is true, but it is no bar to a database. As long as the database is held on a computer system that uses around three computer languages it will accessible by all police computers, which would be able to send the information on. What may have happened here is an outbreak of what I call the "bells and whistles syndrome". What is wanted has not been decided. Such is the structure of the committee, along with a lack of project control, that no one has made a decision on what is needed.
	At one end of the scale, every policeman encountering someone with a gun would have a handheld IT device. He could see whether the gun is the one the person says it is and whether it is the subject of a firearms certificate or shotgun licence. He could then ask whether the person is the holder of the certificate. To go that far would be complicated. Instead, we could make it possible for a policeman to communicate with an information centre capable of accessing the register. Someone could call the policeman back on his mobile telephone within 10 minutes and tell him what the situation is.
	Reference has been made to large, complicated systems with names like Phoenix and others that I cannot recall. Can the Minister explain the structure of this project? How has it been controlled? Am I right in suspecting that a large committee is looking for all sorts of things, but is without the power of decision? When that is the case, one must remember that it is in the interests of IT consultants to ensure that lots of questions remain unanswered because their taxi meter is ticking.
	I want to touch on only one other aspect, which has been referred to by other noble Lords: the relationship between the Home Office and Parliament, in particular with the House of Lords. Of the Written Questions tabled before 20 December, there are, I think, 48 that have not yet been answered. Over 20 out of the 48 belong to the Home Office. That is not good for respect between ourselves and the Home Office, and this is particularly important at a time when so many of the really important issues facing us impinge upon the Home Office's role. The Home Office is, along with the Treasury and the Foreign Office, one of the three leading ministries. It is surely not in anybody's interests that we do not have a good relationship with the Home Office.
	I have one more reference: there is at the moment a member of the Statutory Instruments Committee with whom there has been an exchange about a letter sent to us by the Home Office, which has been described as "discourteous;" it has also been described in rather stronger terms. The chairman of the committee has been in correspondence, and it has now been discussed with senior Home Office officials who came to a meeting and expressed no knowledge of the matter, although of course it was to do with statutory instruments. I feel very strongly that this is not a situation that should be allowed to continue. If indeed it has been decided by some combination of the Home Office and the police that it is not worth having a register, why does the Minister not introduce a very short piece of legislation so that they no longer have the obligation to do it? However, if they have the obligation to do it, it really does need to be done.
	In conclusion, my feeling is that, given all the difficult issues of today, public policy demands that we get this sorry saga behind us, and that we have a full and open explanation of how it has come about, in order that we can all learn lessons for the future.

Lord McNally: My Lords, I should like to immediately follow the point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles. This House is not an unreasonable House. If at any time in the past nine years a Minister had come and argued persuasively to the House that the proposed scheme was unworkable, I believe that he would have been listened to and respected. But that has never been Ministers' approach. We have had, as has been said, excuse after excuse after excuse. I do not often boast about my predictions, but on 27 January 2005, almost exactly a year ago, speaking in this House on the delay in bringing in the register, I said that with the noble Lords, Lord Corbett and Lord Marlesford, firmly gripping ministerial ankles, there would be no likelihood of the issue disappearing from our agenda. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, for the way that he has kept up the pressure.
	In one way it is almost high farce and one could make references to "Yes Minister". Yet, as the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, rightly reminded us, as we approach the 10th anniversary of Dunblane, it is no joke and no high farce to those who were bereaved there. There is real perplexity about how this could drag on for so long. I really welcome this debate and the fact that the noble Lords, Lord Marlesford and Lord Corbett, have been joined by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in affixing himself to ministerial ankles. I hope that that is another spur. I was also pleased that the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, took part in the debate. After one of my previous interventions, he courteously wrote to remind me that the real problem of gun crime was illegal, not legal, ownership. I freely accept that and the fact that the vast majority of shooters—I think that that is what they call themselves—are pursuing a sport respectably.
	I also found the contribution of the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, extremely useful both technically and in reminding us that, although it becomes almost a joke, it does not help when one of the great departments of state performs so lamentably. As he rightly said, this is not the only issue; as the Leader of the House had to explain not so long ago, by far the worst complaints about responding to Questions and replying to letters relate to the Home Office. Given that it is the department of state that deals with such an important area as law and order, public concern rightly grows.
	It also calls into question the competence of police forces. I do not know whether I would go as far as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, but I have some sympathy with his argument about the national police force and the need for better national co-ordination. As a Member of another place more than 20 years ago, I was absolutely appalled at the Heath Robinson contraptions used to put together data for checking on the Yorkshire Ripper. Officials were sticking pins through cards to find out who had been interviewed and the like. More recently, we had the bungling and misapplication of information in the Soham tragedy.
	There is public concern about whether police forces can use modern technology efficiently. Again, that changes the issue from a merry laugh and a talk about "Yes Minister" in action to one of real public concern. As speaker after speaker has emphasised, people want to see real action and competence in this area. I understand and accept what is said in the Home Office's own brief:
	"Contrary to public perception, the overall level of gun crime in the UK is very low—less than 0.5 per cent of all crime recorded by the police".
	One of the things about being in this place and notching up a few decades is the perspective that, although it is probably right to say that the level of gun crime is low, in my lifetime the perception and reality of gun crime have been transformed. One of my earliest childhood memories is of Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley—the latter actually went to the gallows for a gun crime. The shock and horror of a gun crime is not as great today as it was in the 1950s. Today there is a culture particularly linked to drug crime that causes public concern, particularly in the three police areas referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett.
	Although there are times when we could almost laugh at this real long-running Whitehall farce, there is public concern about the competence of the Home Office, the police force and Ministers. I am very sorry that my dear old friend the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, has caught this parcel today but I hope that readers of Hansard will see that this is a disgraceful performance at every level, one that at some stage deserves not just a ministerial explanation but a ministerial resignation.

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Marlesford for initiating this debate. It is an issue of great public interest and—as we have heard in the passionate speeches from all sides of the House—a matter of great interest to your Lordships as well. The assiduity with which my noble friend has doggedly pursued the issue over many years since initiating the amendment to the original Bill is an example to us all.
	The Minister will be aware that, unlike my noble friend, I do not have form on this issue. Coming fresh to it, I began as an innocent. Yet, as my researches progressed I was astonished at the catalogue of government statements, promises, commitments and undertakings about Section 39 which have followed in an almost unbroken sequence since the passage of the parent Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997. It is a catalogue categorised by one common link: an apparent unwillingness or inability to make any substantive progress on the practical implementation of the provisions of the section.
	The major milestones in this inelegant story seem to be as follows. Though the Act was passed by Parliament in 1997, as early as January 1998 the Home Office made a first announcement that the register would be delayed for a year. On 22 January 1998, a Downing Street spokesman was quoted on the subject in the Scotsman as saying:
	"The Government is acting as quickly as it can. We will be pressing the police to come up with this specification for the register as soon as possible".
	In 2000, the Home Affairs Committee report Firearms Control, which has been extensively quoted this afternoon, described the absolutely central nature of this operation to the firearms licensing system and, in a dismayed tone, went on to say:
	"We find it unacceptable that no firm date can be given for the implementation of a key provision of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 . . . We are appalled that the national database of certificate holders and applications is not yet in immediate prospect, over two years after the implementation of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997".
	As many noble Lords have said, the late Lord Williams of Mostyn and the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton—from whom we will have the pleasure of hearing in a few minutes—continued to underline the Government's commitment to a speedy establishment of the register. It was next announced, according to my researches, that the system was due to begin operation in the summer of 2001. In the event, the launch was pushed back to August 2004. This was apparently due to problems with procurement, but perhaps that is not surprising since it is understood that the Police Information Technology Organisation, which had been given responsibility for the system, did not even sign a contract with a service provider until October 2003. There were apparently certain problems with the system which led to delays, which the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, described in a memorable phrase as "not easily avoided". That is in the Official Report  of 4 November 2004. It is a Delphic phrase indeed.
	The topic then re-emerged in the summer of 2005. The system was due to go live on 11 July, but, on 12 July, Hazel Blears MP announced that load testing for the live piloting of the system would resume in the autumn. In October, further announcements by Hazel Blears suggested that implementation would begin in November last year, but the current position remains unclear, with the Government still apparently unable to commit to a start date. According to a report in the Sunday Express on 13 November 2005, the Government are "rushing"—a strange word to use—to make the database operational for all police forces in time for the 10th anniversary of the Dunblane tragedy—to which the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, referred—on 13 March. The noble Lord also referred to the small piece on page 4 of today's Times entitled "Gun register delay". I share his hope that the Minister will be able to address this particular issue when he winds up the debate.
	This is a sorry state of affairs, as so many noble Lords have said. The Government's "rush" to implement this legislation will apparently take 10 years from the time of the tragedy that gave rise to the legislation in the first place. On these Benches we believe that gun crime is a major problem in the United Kingdom and that the levels are already too high and continue to rise. If the Government were really serious about their commitments to reduce gun crime, they should have ensured that this system, which the Minister's colleague, Charles Clarke MP, has described as central to attempts to tackle the problem of illegally held firearms, was up and running long, long ago.
	Perhaps more worrying is that it is feared that the Home Office has lost whatever heart it had for the project in the first place. A Home Office source quoted in the Mirror on 19 November 2005 said:
	"There is just not the will to deal with another big, complicated computer project on a national basis. All the energies are going to setting up a database for ID cards and this isn't a priority any longer".
	Delays are not the only unsatisfactory aspect of this issue; a great deal of taxpayers' money has already been spent on a system that has yet to become fully operational nationwide. Hazel Blears stated that the budget for the NFLMS was £4,002,000 for the three years 2002-05 in a Written Answer of 20 December last. But by June 2005 the total had risen to £5.4 million—a figure stated by the Minister's colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, at col. WA 104 of Hansard on 13 June. This is an overrun of some £2 million, or 34 per cent. Meanwhile, the fact that these frequently repeated commitments remain unfulfilled does not seem to be inhibiting the Government from rushing to legislate further on the topic. The Violent Crime Reduction Bill is due to have a Second Reading shortly in another place. Clauses 26 to 28 of that Bill impose yet more restrictions—this time on the sale of airguns, though extraordinarily this does not cover second-hand or car boot sales—an area which I should have thought was important to cover. The Bill also proposes raising the limit for buying an airgun from 17 to 18 years of age.
	In the mean time the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 has just raised the airgun purchasing limit from 14 to 17 years. The Government have not even had time to assess the impact of that change before legislating again. Surely the Minister must agree that instead of these gestures, which I fear play to the gallery, the Government should be concentrating on the detailed work of implementing their nine year-old—or is it eight year, three month-old?—commitment to creating a national firearms register.
	The opinion of my noble friend Lord Marlesford, as reported in the Scotsman on 14 November 2004, was that the failure of this Government to meet their obligations is,
	"a scandal bordering on outrage".
	I trust that the Minister will now be able to set my noble friend's mind—and, indeed, those of a number of other noble Lords—at rest with some comprehensive answers this afternoon.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, this is a very serious subject and it is certainly a very serious matter. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, for his persistence on it. I am chastened by the encouragement that I have received, publicly and privately, from my noble friend Lord Corbett during his pursuance of the matter. I pay tribute to all those who have contributed to this short debate, which I believe is very important, not least because of the importance of the subject matter itself.
	In a sense I start where the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, finished, in restating this Government's commitment to tackling gun crime and dealing with its consequences. As the noble Lord rightly said, this Government have not been reluctant to come forward with measures to tackle gun crime. He rightly referred to the Violent Crime Reduction Bill which contains a number of new measures. It ensures that air weapons are sold only through registered dealers. It increases from 17 to 18 the age at which air weapons can be acquired. It makes it an offence for a person of any age to fire an air weapon beyond the boundaries of premises. It makes it an offence to manufacture, import or sell realistic imitation firearms. It specifies manufacturing standards and introduces a minimum age of 18 for buying or selling imitation firearms. It doubles the maximum sentence for the possession of an imitation firearm and restricts the sale of primers and ammunition loading presses. It corrects an anomaly in the provisions requiring a minimum sentence for some firearms offences.
	Yes, we do take these seriously, and no, these are not gimmicks. These are real changes and they will bring improvements to the way in which our law works. The reason for that is very clear. As a number of noble Lords have said, there has been an increase in firearms offences, although as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, made very clear, the level of offences involving the use of firearms is very low. We should be proud and pleased that that is the case.

The Earl of Shrewsbury: My Lords, would the Minister also reiterate that it is, by a vast majority, illegally held weapons, not legally held ones, that are used to perpetrate crime?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Earl anticipated a point that I wanted to reiterate; I am grateful to him, because I think he made the point earlier, quite rightly so.
	We have a firm system of regulatory control. I was going to congratulate all governments for the way in which that system has, by accretion, developed; I must say how important I believe that to be.
	I take the chastening seriously. Like the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, I am committed, as I was back in 1999, to ensuring that the system that he brought into play by amending Section 39 of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997.
	If I repeat the point from time to time, it is simply because we keep hearing suggestions that somehow we are trying to head off this requirement. We are not trying to do that. It is simply not the case. I can do no more than be absolutely honest and say that there have been difficulties, as has been made clear during the course of the debate this evening and as my noble friend Lord Rooker has previously explained very graphically. If the Home Office wanted to block this policy, it could have done so much more easily and I suppose—to be honest—much more cheaply at an earlier point in the process. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, is right to say that if we had come back with an honest—he put it—approach to this issue, saying, "We didn't really think this was necessary or essential", perhaps the House would have listened and taken a different view.
	We want to get this system up and running. It is very disappointing when piloting and testing reveals particular problems, but that is after all the main purpose of that process. There is no point in rolling out and trying to run a system unless everyone is confident that it will work and that all the technical difficulties have been resolved. The police would insist on it and rightly so.
	I take the view that we wish to look forward rather than backwards. I think the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, was right to remind us of the 10th anniversary of Dunblane. That is, to my way of thinking, an essential reminder of the importance of this. In a sense, this legislation and the effectiveness of this process must at least be the one happy legacy that will be effective in trying to ensure that we better control the use of firearms in our society.
	I am going to concentrate on explaining to your Lordships where matters currently stand and how we see this project moving forward. Perhaps I should explain that the National Firearms Licensing Management System, the NFLMS, is an application being delivered by a third-party supplier, together with an interface to the police national computer and to the national firearms certificate holders register, known as the NFCHR, which resides upon it. At the outset, the aim was to meet the strict requirements of Section 39:
	"There shall be established a central register of all persons who have applied for a firearms or shot gun certificate or to whom a firearms or shot gun certificate has been granted or whose certificate has been renewed".
	The section further provides for the register to be kept by means of a computer, which provides online access to all police forces.
	I should perhaps pause here and explain that the framework of the actual certificate holders register has been in place since October 2003. Development work to meet the strict requirement of Section 39 has therefore been done. However, that is only part of the story.
	It became clear as the development proceeded that the register would need to be populated from records created by local forces, which ran their own systems that provided them with a wider range of functions and information than Section 39 required.
	Running those systems and the certificate holders register together would result in a significant disbenefit. To keep both systems working would require double keying of information, which the police understandably regarded as unacceptable. There was also a significant risk that the less useful system—that is, the central NFCHR—would only be spasmodically updated, thereby making it unreliable even as a mechanism for checking whether a person applying for a certificate already had one or, more importantly, had been refused one from another force. Because of that, we came to the view that it would be better to undertake further work to provide a national firearms licensing management system which would both meet the Section 39 requirement spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, and provide significant additional business benefits for the police and the Home Office. That project was initiated in September 2002, which is essentially the starting point of the project that we are considering today.
	It is no secret that the NFLMS has faced many delays; there is no point in pretending otherwise. Those delays have resulted from a combination of the time taken to build the system and deal with the issues which arose from that, and the external delays that could not easily have been avoided. For example, there was a freeze at one stage on all new applications to allow a central upgrade of the PNC infrastructure to maintain continuity of service to police forces. There was also a need to develop concurrently a link between the national DNA database and criminal records on the PNC.
	Once development of the application was complete, it was necessary to put it through a series of independent tests to verify and demonstrate to police forces its suitability and readiness for service. Two forces volunteered to act as pilots to carry out user acceptance testing, known as the alpha pilot; and live running, known as the beta pilot. One was the Metropolitan Police Service and the other the Lancashire Constabulary.
	The beta pilot commenced during the week beginning 14 November 2005 and ended as scheduled on 2 December. As a prerequisite of going live on NFLMS, local force data had to be migrated from the local database to the NFLMS database and a subset of that data was then passed to PNC to populate the certificate holders register. Over 100,000 records were migrated from local systems to the NFLMS, and half of that number were subsequently migrated to the PNC, and in broad terms the migration was successful. However, for reasons that I shall endeavour to explain, there was a 7 per cent failure rate of records getting on to the PNC, and that proved to be disruptive to the running of the pilot. Where a record had successfully migrated from local systems to NFLMS but had subsequently failed to migrate to the PNC, the updating of that record, while possible in the NFLMS, generated error messages from the PNC at every stage, and that proved to be unworkable. Records must be synchronised on both the NFLMS and the PNC for effective updating to be carried out.
	The reasons for those failures were varied, but can be broadly grouped under the headings of data quality, PNC validation and incorrect mapping. I understand that it was not physically possible to manually work through all of the error messages while managing the day-to-day business and coping with dual running, which required the operators to double key. As one might expect, there were also some variations between forces' working practices and the business rules of the application, which tended to lengthen the process even more. Taking all those issues together, but due primarily to the number of errors in back record conversion revealed during the tests, the two forces decided to revert to their existing systems rather than create an unacceptable and increasing backlog in applications.
	Where are we now? PITO is now assessing the lessons learnt from the beta project and considering what needs to be done before roll-out can be instigated. None of that means that the project is fatally flawed. On the contrary, it has shown that NFLMS can meet the requirements of Section 39 even without the PNC link facility—and we should all be grateful for that.
	Part of the purpose of the beta project was to test the application against the vagaries of the live environment which has evolved over many years to meet local needs. I should explain that many of the records which failed PNC validation did so because of poorly formatted addresses and postcodes, or minor variations in force working practices. The resulting volume of error messages—which needed immediate attention before processing could continue—proved to be unworkable without creating an unacceptable backlog. That is something which everybody in the firearms world would wish to avoid.
	So, how can these defects be rectified? The major issue during the pilot was the failure to migrate a significant number of records successfully to PNC, and to update those records to remain synchronised within the NFLMS. The success of migrating records from local systems to the NFLMS suggests that it may be preferable to do that in the first instance without interfacing to PNC at the same time. That means the systems could not be out of step, and the unacceptable situation of inaccurate information existing on PNC would not therefore arise. I emphasise that compliance with Section 39 would be fully achieved, albeit the register would reside on NFLMS instead of on the PNC. The full business benefit of NFLMS interfacing to PNC could be achieved at a later date, which appears to be the best way forward.
	The police service remains committed to the PNC link, but individual forces do not have the capacity to deliver both day-to-day running and to undertake the data cleansing needed to improve data migration. Removing that problematic interface in the short term appears to be the best way of moving the project forward, and is the most efficient and effective means of delivering a meaningful and useable product in the near future. That will also allow time to resolve data quality issues. There is no all-encompassing, automated process for data cleansing; but PITO has undertaken to assist forces in the process. It is also working with the supplier to resolve other issues arising from the beta project, with a view to re-running it before the end of March.
	The delays to this project are regrettable in the extreme, even if they have not always been avoidable. The Government also readily acknowledge that there are problems which need to be addressed across the entire police service in order to achieve a more common approach to introducing new information and communications technology. The greater use of more component-based software is already being considered and we hope that will make it easier to cope with conflicting priorities in the future.
	As for this particular database, we remain committed to implementing it and fully expect further piloting to take place by the end of March. That will be based on the lessons learned during the last beta pilot and, assuming that the changes needed to alleviate the problem are successful, PITO then believes that it should be possible to start the roll-out process by April, as the Times said. I know that PITO would be happy to arrange a demonstration for any of your Lordships who wish to know more about how the system is intended to work, so I make that general offer and promise.
	It is not the case that the Home Office wants to block this system, nor that there have been efforts to make it unworkable across Whitehall. While I am tempted to take up the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, that we should give it over to the Mayor to run, that is not an offer that I can accept. It is our responsibility to make it work; it is a system with great merit. Noble Lords have spoken with great persuasion and passion on this, and rightly so, but it is our job in government to sort out any mess and muddle arising in the past few years.
	I have taken rather a long time going over the detail, but before I sit down it is only fair that I answer one or two specific questions. The noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, asked why the Government have not replaced the Firearms Consultative Committee. The Government were extremely grateful for the valuable work that the original committee undertook, in which the noble Earl played an important part, but we decided that it had come to the end of its useful life and should be replaced by a more wide-ranging, two-tier consultative system. One tier will consider the technical aspects of firearms, and the other the wider issues. We will consider how the new committees might be constituted once we have determined how to proceed with the review of firearms control. We are focused on the importance of that, and are intent on proceeding with a firearms advisory committee because of the important work carried out in the past.
	The noble Lord, Lord Corbett, asked about the review group that met as recently as yesterday. My understanding is that it debated the lessons learned from the pilot and needed to explore some of the specific changes in the application of the system. I cannot give the noble Lord details of the specific recommendations which will be submitted to a full meeting of the user group on Friday of next week. I can reassure him that the user group consists of representatives of PITO, the supplier and the police forces.
	The noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, asked how the project was being controlled. I made some of that clear, but it is under the control of PITO project board and includes representatives of the project's senior users, the Home Office and user group representatives.
	I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, for his persistence on this matter. I have said that many times, as the noble Lord reminded me—on at least six occasions and many other times privately. I remain passionate about this project being put in place, because, like everyone else who has taken part in the debate, I recognise its importance—and Dunblane is seared on all of our memories. Parliament is absolutely right to insist that we proceed with this. Our determination is clear and I have given as clear an explanation as I can, including all the technical jargon, as to why there have been delays, and I or other Ministers hope to report back in due course when the project is up and running and successful, as it needs to be. I thank the House for its forbearance on this matter.

House adjourned at eleven minutes past six o'clock.
	Thursday, 19 January 2006.